Archive of Our Own

“ whoever said, it's not whether you win or lose that counts, probably lost. ”

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And if they asked him when exactly he fell in love—he’d never let it get that far, but if they did—what would he say?

Give the same answer as the rest of the country, that he loved him from his first smile, in the chariot draped with fish netting, his skin glistened by saltwater. But that wasn’t right. Who knew anyone from a grand entrance? So, say he loved him after he saved a fellow tribute from drowning, and begged him to please stop, wait, please, drop the knife, please when the disoriented kid tried to kill him afterward, and then wept over his body like the tears might have raised him from the dead. That exacerbated the symptoms, but Jannik was long gone by then, an incurably lost cause.

It had been his Reaping, before the name Carlos Alcaraz meant anything to anyone but his family. The chosen boy from District Four had cried unabashed, but still wrapped his arm around the girl reaped with him, even though she had been three years older and a half-head taller, and confided something in her ear that set them off laughing, raspy and soft, interrupted by hiccups and snot. But they laughed, and no one in the country could have been more alive at that moment or seemed as untouchable.

Calling it a crush overshot the mark. Carlos had been fourteen and Jannik sixteen, and they lived in different districts, worlds apart, and Carlos was supposed to have died before Jannik ever got the chance to meet him. In all their other lives running parallel to these, they passed in the night, two trains on opposing tracks, bound away.

It hadn’t been a crush, but Jannik did love him from the second he laid eyes on him.

He loved him like a ship loved the eye of the storm, like someone in a house on fire loved the roof, like you loved a friend who said everything would be alright when nothing would be alright again. An unbelievable amount of pain coursed through their lives, constant as a current, as rapid and electric, but here was a moment of calm, a breath of smokeless air, a sheltering arm holding you close and vowing to protect you from the worst of it.

Imagine, that was before Jannik really knew him.

Charlie,

I had already taken out this piece of paper and a pen before I realized I don’t have anything new to tell you, except I miss you. That’s not even new either. I miss you all the time.

You know.

– Jannik.

“I volunteer.”

The fateful words, croaked from the gravely base of his throat, were swallowed up in the white noise. Only Arnaldi had heard him. His head snapped in his direction, the terror in his eyes blaring loud as an alarm bell. “Don’t,” he hissed. At the same time, in the center of the square, Musetti continued his hanged man’s walk to the stage. Somewhere at the back of the crowd, a woman had begun to wail.

“I volunteer,” Jannik repeated, his voice solidifying.

More boys—old classmates, fellow workers on the auto-assembly line, lifelong friends—craned their necks to find the idiot begging to hurl his life away. Anticipating his next move, Arnaldi threw his full weight at Jannik and locked his arms around his chest, caging him, refusing to let go. It hurt. Jannik had to leverage the few inches he had on him to wrench free, and the helpless noise that tore from Arnaldi’s throat hurt worse. But he had to go. He pushed his way out of the corral just as Musetti reached the stage steps.

“I volunteer as tribute!”

Gasps, explosive, as rattling as engine backfire, shot off through the square.

No one volunteered in District Six. Not for anything. Not even with a death wish. From the ages of twelve to eighteen, the kids of Six donned whichever clothes of theirs smelled the least like gasoline, trudged on autopilot to the central square, mourned for the reaped boy and girl from the moment their names were read, watched the living ghosts walk in a shell-shocked stupor to their fates, and thanked an otherwise-uncaring god the odds had been in their favor for another year.

Jannik had broken seventy years of precedent. And at eighteen, he would have been home free.

The camera drones found him standing alone in the center aisle. Glimpsing himself on screen, pale but hard-eyed, his mouth set in a firm line, Jannik was overcome by the uncanny feeling of looking in a mirror and not recognizing the reflection there. On another screen, to sell the drama of the moment, the camera panned to a gaping Musetti, one foot still suspended above the first step of the stage. He blinked at a shuttering speed, as though Jannik might be a mirage, something too good to be true and too selfish to hope for.

Who is it? The whispers reached him muted, overwhelmed by his footsteps pounding on the cement and the blood rushing to his head. Look at the hair. It’s one of the Sinner boys. He caught sight of Veronica amongst the other seventeen-year-old girls. Her dress was too loose to show anything damning, but she must know Musetti told him, because when her watery eyes met his, she mouthed, thank you.

At the foot of the stage, Jannik reached for Musetti. His hand found the nape of his neck, fingers threading through his soft hair. The hug was sloppy, a mess of flailing limbs and trembling shoulders. They had hugged goodbye yesterday, too, while giving each other shit about needing to shower for Reaping Day. Why bother, Musetti had said with his roguish grin, half of the reason he got away with anything, everything and everyone loved him regardless, no one in the Capitol will get to see our beautiful faces.

“It’s okay,” Jannik whispered, not for anyone but them. “You would do the same for me.”

Musetti shook his head, tucked into the crook of Jannik’s neck. A wordless bullshit. Jannik wouldn’t hold it against him. He hadn’t known he was capable of it himself until a minute ago.

Look after them for me while I’m gone, Sinner. 

It had been five years, but Matteo's voice, his request, still rang clear. Jannik remembered how big and important it had made him feel, mature beyond his years and Matteo knew it, so he swore on his life he wouldn't let him down. He'd watch out for them. Protect them, same as Matteo did. This was nothing more than that promise’s inevitable end.

Once on stage, squinting into the harsh glare of sunlight refracting off steel, Jannik was instructed by the district’s escort, Simone, to announce who he was for all of Panem to hear. Cold sweat slid down his back. He said his name, and it came out flat, emotionless. Nothing like how his friends said it, how it sounded when his dad would call him home.

A sound he had never heard before coming from the voice he had known since birth ripped through the air. His mom, screaming. A scuffle broke out at the back left, his mom fighting to reach him, to stop the runaway train her foolish son had sent barreling down a broken track.

But they were District Six, the first and last stop for all of the country’s transportation needs. No one knew better than they did that an object once in motion stayed in motion, unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. And the force of any given person, in any given District, amounted to nothing much at all. His mother, though the greatest force of nature in his life, didn’t have the power to save her son from himself, much less the Capitol.

Tears pricked his eyes as he realized just how foolish he was. The face on the screens, the one he didn’t recognize, burned at the back of his mind. Who would give a shit about that scrap-metal boy from District Six? He was not the District One golden boy, Roger Federer, born with a face worth more than a diamond mine and showered with so many sponsor gifts during his Games that the Gamemakers had to impose a daily limit. He was not Novak Djokovic, forged, sharpened, and steeled in the training academies of District Two, the crown fitted for his head before the canon of his first kill. He was not even in the league of last year’s victor, Iga Świątek, who disguised her genius with nervous, flittering smiles, as dangerous and unassuming as a live wire.

Who was he compared to Carlos Alcaraz, wunderkind? Nobody. He, Jannik Sinner, was going to die.

The Reaping ended as it always did, in a pitiful whimper, without applause. On the other side of the microphone, his fellow tribute, Elisabetta, held her chin high, staring defiantly towards the cold morning sun. Simone ushered them through the hollow mouth of city hall, and Jannik took a final look, over the shoulders of the Peacekeepers flanking him, at his home, searching the horror-struck crowd for the faces of the people he loved who he would never see again. The doors shut before he found any of them.

Dear Jannik,

I had a dream last night about your train. You will have to describe it better for me because I do not think I dream it right, but it had wheels instead of hovering above the track and it made the whistle sound you told me about. In my dream, I was waiting at the train station in Four and I knew the train was coming before I saw it. Because of the whistle. You are right, it is much better to know something is on the way, just around a bend.

It is like the opposite of being on a ship at night and seeing the light from a lighthouse. Knowing you are almost home, versus knowing someone is almost home to you. Does that make sense? Maybe not, but maybe also you understand what I mean.

Anyway I woke up just as the train pulled into the station, so I did not find out what I was waiting for, but it must have been something good.

Mama wants to know what your favorite sweet is, so she can send it with me next time we see each other in the Capitol. She says the food there cannot beat homemade. Everyone in the Alcaraz house says hello. So do Juanki, Rafa, and Casper. I have not seen Bjorn much recently, but he would want me to say hello from him, too.

How is everything in Six? I hope your dreams have not been too bad. Rafa told me what helps him is trying to listen for the sound of something you love, even if it is too far away or is not there. I listen for the ocean. Maybe you can listen for a train whistle.

Yours,
Charlie

P.S. I know you have said you think you will, but are you a mentor this year?

When Jannik stepped off of the train and back onto the concrete slab of ground, a hallmark of home he hadn’t known how much he missed until it steadied his wobbly legs, his mom gathered him in her arms, stamped kisses on his sunburnt face, and clutched him so tightly, she cracked one of his ribs, not fully-healed yet. They’d not know until later, when the Capitol doctor who accompanied him on the ride back to Six performed a final physical and noticed his side mottling blue. For once, Jannik welcomed the pain, its proof of life.

Also on hand for his homecoming were his dad and brother, the high beams of their smiles brighter than on the day Jannik graduated school with honors and announced his intention to work his way up to a position on the country’s high-speed rail. The rail of his dreams had spirited him to the Capitol, and, like it had a promise to keep, brought him back home again. Whole, relatively. He passed the eye test, anyway.

Off to the side of the platform, to give the Sinner family room, stood Arnaldi, Sonego, and Cobolli. They had varying degrees of slack-jaw, moon-eyed like they were in the presence of a ghost. More like a skeleton, Jannik might have joked, if he thought anyone would actually find that funny.

Standing further back, self-designated pariahs, Musetti and Veronica were twined together, guilt marring their faces. It disoriented Jannik to see only the two of them, and then it dawned on him why: he had been expecting a baby. Except why would there be a baby? Only a month had passed since Jannik left for the Capitol, yet he felt he had lived a whole lifetime.

“You have to smile for them.” Darren, who since made himself scarce, had told him that as a parting shot of mentoring advice. “Unless you want to spend the rest of your life trying to make them understand, you have to smile. They’ll do the rest.”

Because everything else Darren told him had borne out, because he had forty years of experience to back it up, because Jannik didn’t know what else to do, he smiled. He laughed at Sonego’s bad jokes, though his rib ached. He saw the smudged reflection of a girl with icy blonde hair in the train window, pretended he didn’t. He smiled, and smiled, and smiled, until the muscles in his face throbbed alongside the bad rib. Everyone else cried, while repeating, over and over again, how happy they were. So happy.

Charlie,

Lorenzo claims Matteo said his first word today—car. No one believes him. Matteo is crawling now, though. Sometimes when I look at him, I start crying for no reason. I guess not for no reason, but you know.

Sorry I’ve never gotten better at this.

– Jannik.

An acrobat, with a fire-lit baton bit between her gold-dusted teeth, winked at him from her bronzed hoop, suspended above a pool of blood. He recoiled. In the pool, he saw the face of Malene, her hair fanned across the ice. Her eyes fluttered closed as so much blood, too much—

A partygoer dunked a crystal chalice into the pool and came away with an overflowing cup he drank from greedily. Wine, that was what the pool was filled with, not blood. Someone else tried to shove a different chalice in his hands, but Jannik staggered backwards into the solid chest of Darren, who whispered in his ear, “We really need to work on your smile, kid.”

Darren didn’t stick around long enough to give an impromptu lesson, not that Jannik blamed him. He had suffered through forty years of the same meaningless pomp, and he wouldn’t have been able to save Jannik from the arms of the Capitol socialites looking to strip him for parts. By this time next year, he’d be another old model everyone passed over in favor of the brand new toy, but tonight belonged to him. It was his party. He had to bear each perfumed kiss skirting the corner of his lips, mutely accepting compliments to his impeccable strategy in the arena, as if he had one. If he did, it would have been the same strategy he hoped would see him through tonight: survive, by any means necessary.

Over the years, Jannik had mastered a singular magic trick: he could turn himself invisible at parties. Impressive really, with a shock of red hair and height like his. His friends ribbed him over how much trouble he had letting loose when they dragged him to one of their illegal junkyard raves, but Jannik refused to think of himself as a killjoy, just someone with his eyes on the future. Too many run-ins with the Peacekeepers and he could kiss a job on the high-speed rail goodbye. 

His old dream, the one Matteo had passed down to him, but Matteo had his dreams reaped and snuffed out, and now Jannik had enough money to never work again. He could afford almost anything he wanted, except peace of mind.

The ensemble his stylist had stuffed him in for the evening, a double-breasted suit in cherry red and reflective like the waxed hood of a car, would have made blending in impossible in Six, but he ranked among the least-extravagantly dressed in the presidential garden. He ducked behind a topiary sculpted in the shape of a swan, then a cluster of sunflowers surpassing the height of sycamores, until inevitably he caught the wrong light, was sniffed out, and had to move on to the next hiding place.

During the reprieves he stole, Jannik juggled calming his heart rate to a non-lethal number and searching the crowd for his fellow victors. Some he recognized more easily than others, like Jim Courier, District One victor turned Hunger Games on-air personality. He had made himself a fixture on the dance floor, entertaining Capitol ladies longing to be twirled by the man who kept them company through a hologram screen. Earlier in the night, Jim had confided in Jannik that he had hoped he’d win it, but Jannik assumed he told every other victor the same. The least of his crimes, wanting so badly to be beloved.

Most of the older victors, those who won their Games when Jannik’s parents had their names in the Reaping bowls, clustered around the bars. He spotted Darren struggling through a conversation with a drunk and emphatic McEnroe, his arms swinging within striking distance of the silent but sharp Borg. The stories of McEnroe’s temperamentality and Borg’s lethality had become legend even in District Six. Jannik planned to give both a wide berth.

The younger victors enthralled him more, the ones whose Games he had his own memories of. He remembered liking Ons Jabuer’s kind face and the quiet songs she sang to herself as she navigated her arena’s desert terrain. Harvesting songs, she had told the country in her victor’s interview; the fields of District Nine often sounded like a chorus. Ons had taken refuge on a fountain bench, deep in conversation with Maria Sakkari, who had taken out the Career pack of her Games single-handedly, and Casper Ruud, who had won his Games without a single kill. Naively, Jannik had thought he might do the same.

Casper, attention wandering, spotted Jannik in his hiding spot. The smile on his face froze, then faded.

The blood was still on his hands. Jannik knew without having to look at them. Even though he scrubbed them every morning until the skin was raw, Casper could see it. He had been trying to stop the bleeding. Casper had to know that, if he had been watching, and of course he had been watching. She was his tribute, and there she was standing behind him, in the fountain. Soaked to the bone. Malene, with cracks in her lips where ice had crystallized, the heavy rock in her gloved hand. Malene, her name something out of an old fairytale, but she was just a girl and Jannik had—

He ran, before Ons and Maria saw the blood on him, too.

Suddenly, Jannik couldn’t stand the feverish heat of hundreds of bodies packed together. He slipped behind a hedgerow and wandered further from the party, hoping to stumble on a particular person and in denial about how desperate he was to catch sight of him. Desperate but scared, afraid of seeing his smile fall the way Casper’s had, because of him. What he had done.

On the outskirts of the garden, under the shade of a yellowing aspen, he saw two silhouettes in a heated conversation, but as he drew closer, he recognized them as Daniil Medvedev and Stefanos Tsitispas. Whatever Stefanos was saying to Daniil had his nostrils flaring. He snapped something in return that momentarily silenced Stefanos, who stared at Daniil like he had struck him across the face. Finally, Stefanos sputtered out a last word and stormed away, leaving a fuming Daniil alone in the shadows.

His flight instincts should have kicked in already, but seeing two victors from different districts in such an intense and intimate conversation had fixed Jannik to his spot on the lit garden path, obvious and vulnerable. Sensing eyes on him, Daniil turned his head and caught him dead in the act of spying. Immediately, a bolt of fear shot through him.

Of all the victors, more than cold Borg or volatile McEnroe, Jannik wanted to keep the furthest distance between himself and Daniil. It wasn’t that he resented him. Or, if it counted for anything, Jannik did his best not to. Daniil Medvedev was alive, Matteo wasn’t, and Daniil hadn’t killed him himself, but if it had come down to it, if they had been the last ones standing, he wouldn’t have hesitated. The what ifs never used to torture Jannik until he had been in the arena himself.

Daniil glared, as if daring Jannik to say a word, but did nothing else to confront him. Forcing his legs to move, Jannik continued down the path at a fast clip, wrenching himself out of Daniil’s orbit.

The path led him to a secluded greenhouse, as carefully-tended to as everything else in the garden but not a designated party zone, so left unlit. Jannik stole inside, and the greenhouse enveloped him in its humid air—sticky, thick with the scent of chlorophyll, and the best thing he had breathed all night. His body sagged gratefully under the weight of it.

After he shed his jacket, Jannik sat down in the sliver of space not monopolized by terracotta pots, nursing new blooms. He wondered if the young plants were mutations, siblings to the treelike sunflowers growing to the sky outside. Everything in the Capitol must have been natural once, before a forceful hand decided to mold it into something else. Something better, they’d say.

He tipped his head against the glass and closed his eyes. Breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth. He spent a lot of time in the arena reminding himself he had a working set of lungs and he needed to use them. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Your name is Jannik Sinner. Inhale. You’re from District Six. Exhale. You don’t deserve to be here.

The door flew open. Jannik startled, his head knocking against a low shelf. A pot, which had been teetering on the shelf’s edge, toppled into Jannik’s lap, spraying dirt across his pants and the floor. The boy who had stumbled on him had such an aggrieved look on his face, you would have thought he had killed someone. They both already had.

“I am so sorry. I do not mean—I’m sorry—” Carlos Alcaraz glanced around, frantic, in search of a towel. “I can go…” He motioned towards the open door, when the last thing Jannik wanted was for him to leave.

“No!” The unspoken don’t and please resounded in the silence. Jannik moved the pot from his lap and dusted off the dirt, not giving a shit if it streaked his pants. “It’s alright. I hate these things.”

“Oh, I, uh—” Carlos rubbed the sleeve of his shirt, scaled to resemble a silvery fish, and laughed. “Yeah, yeah, me too.”

Abruptly Jannik stopped brushing his pants, distracted by the first genuine laugh he had heard all night. People in the Capitol laughed from the highest register of their voices, ribboning their vocal chords with screechy, birdlike sounds to prove how much fun they were having, but Carlos laughed with his whole body, as if helpless to stop himself. Even as the laughter gradually faded, his smile remained, wide and honest. It plucked at a string in Jannik’s chest, resonating somewhere deep within him.

Neither of them said anything for a while, Jannik sitting in the dirt and Carlos standing in the doorway, haloed in the reds and golds of the waning party. Jannik understood why the Capitol, why the whole country, had fallen so hard and fast for him; everything about him seemed miraculous.

“I can go,” Carlos said, apologetic still, “if you want to be alone, or…”

“I did, I—I do.” Jannik cringed at his own fumbling attempt at honesty. He tilted his chin in the direction of the party. “But from them.”

Somehow understanding him perfectly, Carlos nodded and closed the door, shutting himself inside the greenhouse with Jannik. He took a seat across from him, careful to avoid the trails of dirt. Once he had gotten comfortable, he looked at Jannik and smiled again, effortless.

“You do not like the party?” he asked. His accent was more pronounced in person than it came across on TV. It spoke to how prized Carlos was that the Capitol blithely ignored such clear evidence he had been brought up speaking a maiden language other than Panem’s strictly-enforced official one.

“To be honest, I’m not…” Jannik frowned and tried to think of what Sonego or Arnaldi would say. “…good at them.”

“They are not easy,” Carlos agreed, “but they get, uh…” His brows crinkled. “Easier?”

The corners of his mouth tugged upward, the closest Jannik had gotten to a smile since he stepped foot in the Capitol. “For me, not likely,” he said, shaking his head ruefully. “They will never like me.”

While easy to say he didn’t need the socialites and social climbers to adore him, Jannik saw how their affection smoothed the path for victors like Roger and Carlos. If this was his life now, he’d prefer it not feel like unanesthetized surgery every time he had to attend an event.

“They love you,” Carlos protested with a surprising depth of conviction. Jannik had seen the serious side of him before but only through a screen. Back then, he had been captivated by his intensity; experiencing that intensity without a barrier, having it focused solely on him, Jannik felt like he had stepped into the path of a speeding car. Frozen in the headlights, all he could do was brace himself for a devastating impact. “What you did, for your friend, I…”

As Carlos struggled to find the words, Jannik ducked his head, embarrassed by the lies. The bow-tied narrative the Capitol ran with, the loyal boy from Six willing to risk his life to save a friend, might have a bit of truth to it, enough for him to look the part in a highlight reel and play-act in the company of people who only cared about shiny surfaces, but anyone with half a brain and a moral compass pointing due north would see Jannik was nothing special. Just lucky, in a few moments when it mattered most.

“Honestly, I didn’t really know what I was doing,” Jannik confessed, trusting the plants and Carlos to keep his secret. “Any of it.”

“I think you are brave.” Carlos scooted forward, forgetting about the dirt. The toes of his shoes tapped against Jannik’s. “Like when you climbed that mountain in the snow, the whole time I hold my breath. But you never cry, you never look scared, never…”

Overwhelmed by Carlos’s sincerity and fighting against the impulse to call him a liar, Jannik mustered a strained, “Neither were you.”

“Ah,” Carlos said, his smile turning bashful. “You did not watch mine much then.”

You’re wrong, Jannik did not say. I watched more than I should have, because of you.

“It may not look like it, but I was scared the whole time,” he said, a less difficult truth to own. “Do you remember, I threw up, first day.”

Carlos wrinkled his nose, his shoulders shaking with soundless laughter, and Jannik wondered if this was what they had to do, find ways to laugh about it. The bile tasted too fresh at the back of his throat for Jannik to join in with Carlos, but he did smile, something about Carlos’s good mood infectious.

“Yes, yes, but after…” Carlos sobered considerably. “You never gave up. Always, you fight.”

Jannik released a shaky breath and forced himself to hold Carlos’s unwavering gaze, though the way he looked at him, as if they were the same, made him feel like an imposter. Carlos was the boy who never gave up, not Jannik. In every metric—selflessness, bravery, grit—he could not compete with him.

Through the glass wall behind Carlos, Jannik saw a flare shoot into the sky. He tensed, his body recognizing what was about to happen before his mind could play catch up. First, the boom like cannon fire, followed by red and orange firelight raining down on the presidential mansion. Far off, a surge of delighted applause. They loved a brief, brilliant burst of dazzling light. The quicker it burnt out, the better, and then on to the next.

A second boom, cerulean and silver.

Another, and it meant someone else was dead. Another, one less kid between him and home.

“Here.”

His eyes blinked open and he saw Carlos extending a hand to help him up. Jannik took it, noting the calluses and how his palms were a little clammy. Carlos led them outside but not far from the greenhouse, still a safe distance away from the party. The next firework exploded in a shower of golden light that reminded Jannik of the sparks burning off a welder’s torch. Think of home, he told himself, just home.

Carlos squeezed his hand at the sound of the boom, then released it. Quickly, Jannik shoved his hands into his pockets, before he did something as thrillingly stupid as grabbing Carlos’s hand back.

“We have fireworks at home, sometimes,” he told Jannik, his eyes trained on the sky. “End of summer, we all go to the beach and watch them, uh…” With his hands, he mimed a motion like the gentle rolling of waves. “Over water.”

“I had never seen the ocean before the Victory Tour,” Jannik said softly, watching the fireworks not as they burst in the sky but in the colors they splashed across Carlos’s face. Blue suited him best. “In Six, we have a big lake, but it’s not…”

“Not the same,” Carlos finished for him, shaking his head in remorse. “You come back to Four and I will take you on my uncle’s boat.”

Carlos said it with such confidence that Jannik almost believed it. That he could visit Four, sail on Uncle Alcaraz’s boat, fish, and swim, and get seasick and not care. But of course he couldn’t. Travel between the Districts was restricted to those working on Capitol-sanctioned projects and Peacekeepers, no exceptions granted even to victors. The next time Jannik and Carlos saw each, it would be as mentors for the 72nd Hunger Games.

For a brief moment though, Jannik let the pipe dream carry him out to sea on a billowing sail, the sun melting into the horizon, and he watched it standing at the bow of the ship with Carlos, holding his hand.

Dear Jannik,

I think this will reach you by Reaping Day, which means only a few more days until we see each other again. I do not want to be away from home, but it will be good to see you and the other victors. I know for sure Ons and Daniil will be there, but you never know with One, Two, and Five. I hope it is Roger for One. Did you meet him yet? I guess you can tell me in person!

I have been trying to get as much advice as I can from all the victors in Four. I bet you are doing the same with Darren. Juanki says it is okay if we do not talk strategy on the train ride. Not many tributes ask as many questions as I did. (He is teasing me—I do not ask that many questions!) Rafa has not mentored as much as Borg or Juanki (I am not sure why; Casper says he was really good when he mentored him), but he told me the important thing is to be their friend. They really need one.

Casper still does not like to talk about last year, so he does not have much advice, but he says he wishes us both luck. Did I ever tell you he came to say goodbye to me before my Games? We did not know each other, since we were never in school together and his dad worked as a monger, not a fisherman, but he came in right before the time was up and told me he knew I will win. It seemed like maybe I can after that.

My family says hello, and Mama tells me to include some sand for good luck. I think that is just a thing she made up, but I did it anyway. Hopefully it does not get all over your floor!

See you soon.

Yours,
Charlie

The countdown reached the final second. Jannik bit hard into his inner cheek, the coopery tang of blood flooding his mouth.

In the chaos of the opening minutes, the cameras had trouble locating the worst of the action. The images and sounds streamed in, a disorganized splicing of surreal snapshots. Legs sprinting. Off-camera, a distant, blood-curdling scream. Bodies, motion blurred. The girl from Seven streaked across the arena’s sun-bleached beach empty-handed while behind her, out of focus, the boy from Two snapped the neck of the boy from Six, only thirteen. Jannik hadn’t known him, except that he once had seen him scavenging behind the autoplant for batteries with a little bit of juice left.

His mom stood abruptly, her knuckles pressed to her mouth. “I can’t watch this,” she murmured, and retreated to the kitchen.

Mandatory viewing only meant the television had to stay on for the start of the Games and every subsequent night from eight to eleven when Capitol TV aired the day’s most gruesome highlights; few people in the Districts actually watched the footage and Peacekeepers weren’t paid enough to do more than cursory spot checks at the houses closest to their base. No one in Six had been marched out of their house in handcuffs for laying in bed with a pillow covering their head to block out the sounds of children screaming for their moms.

Most years Jannik followed his mom’s lead, but today he stayed on the sofa, eyes locked on the screen. His nails dug into the heels of his hands. The cameras hadn’t shown him yet, and Jannik didn’t know enough to judge if that was a good thing or a very bad one. The Capitol loved him, so they would show it if he—

The perspective shifted from the metal mouth of the Cornucopia to further down the beach, where Carlos Alcaraz had managed to scoop up a small pack and was headed for the water. Everyone else who ran had chosen to chance the looming jungle. 

The pack double-strapped to his back, Carlos dove headfirst into the surf. Unable to follow, the camera hovered at the shoreline, capturing only the choppy waves. “This cannot be the last we see of this year’s golden boy,” came one of the commentators, colored with exaggerated worry. 

Then, after an agonizing half-minute, Carlos resurfaced for a breath, and Jannik exhaled one that had been trapped in his throat.

Shaking his head at the whole scene, his dad said gravely, “He’s so young.”

Only fourteen. If he won, Carlos would be the youngest victor since Rafael Nadal, also of District Four. Nadal’s Games were best remembered for the island the tributes had been marooned on, left with nowhere to run. Unless you could swim. 

For the first time, as he watched Carlos’s strong strokes propel him further and further from the other tributes, Jannik allowed himself to hope.

Charlie,

I think I figured out why I’m so bad at this. Everything I have to tell you, I want to say to your face.

– Jannik.

The morning after his victory party, while waiting to board separate trains, Carlos had asked if he could write to Jannik sometime, and Jannik, exhausted in every way a person could be and caught so off guard by the request, blurted out a stammering yes, then fully expected Carlos to forget he existed.

But he had only been back in Six for two days when his mom came to him with a letter. “New friend in Four?” she asked lightly, though with a troubled look on her face.

Jannik stared at the letter, not quite believing it was real. “Uhm, kind of?”

Resisting the temptation to rip the letter open then and there, Jannik stowed it, keeping it close until he could next slip away to the train cemetery and read it alone. His mom and dad meant well, but since Jannik had come home with a huge cash influx and gifted them early retirements, their new jobs had been worrying over him. In their eyes, he had reset back to twelve.

The train cemetery was his favorite place in Six. The skeletal train bodies in the cemetery were older than the district, older than the Capitol, older than Panem itself. Most of the trains in the yard had been electric-powered, the recent ancestors of Panem’s high-speed rail, but the oldest of them had once run on steam. His favorite had acquired so much rust over the centuries that Jannik had ruined several pairs of jeans laying on top of its boxcars, imagining he was resting on the belly of a sleeping beast and not just the bones of one.

He used to come to the cemetery all the time with the other boys in the neighborhood—Matteo, Sonego, Arnaldi, and later Musetti. Before kicking rocks became the game of choice, they would pretend they were travelers waiting at a train station. Really, the game wasn’t much more than Jannik collecting their tickets to made-up destinations and Matteo shouting, “All aboard,” from the front engine. He’d imitate a whistle, which was how people knew their train had arrived to take them wherever they needed to go.

The great irony was they lived in a district where the people made cars they couldn’t own and built trains most of them would never ride. Jannik looked down at the ancient railroad tracks, stacked like the vertebrae of a broken spine, and just wanted to scream, as loud as that train whistle had to be to have been heard for miles and miles.

Instead of screaming, he opened Carlos’s letter.

Dear Jannik,

I hope you are back by the time this reaches Six. It only takes a few hours to get from the Capitol to Four, but I remember from my victory tour Six is in the opposite direction and more north than Four. How long does the train take for you? You must know all about how the trains work. Going to the Capitol for my Games was my first time on a train. Was it the same for you? Or do you take trains to different places in Six? We sometimes travel by boat and stay over in different places around Four if that is where the catch is good.

Everything is good in Four! My mama is especially happy I am back. She does not like when I am away in the Capitol for too long. We have not talked about how it is my turn to mentor this year. I worry she is going to go door to door in Victor’s Village and guilt someone else into going instead. I know Juanki will do it again if I ask. So will Casper, but it will not be fair. Have you been thinking about mentoring? I think it will be nice we will have each other for our first times.

Juanki and Casper both say hi, and Casper says he is sorry that he did not meet you at the party. It is hard for him, but he wants me to tell you he does not hold anything against you. He understands. We all do. Rafa said something to me after I won I think about a lot. He says, we are the only ones who understand what it feels like, but as long as I am here, you are not alone. You are not alone, Jannik.

I included something in the envelope. I hope it is not crushed! I was on the beach this morning and it reminded me of what you say. You never saw the ocean until you went to Four. Now you have something to remember it.

Sorry this has gone on so long! My papa just said he does not remember me writing this much for school. I hope everything is good with you and your family and maybe we will see each other soon.

Yours,
Charlie

Jannik reread the signature twice, a third time after that, and then rubbed his eyes until he saw a night sky spangled onto the inside of his eyelids. When he opened them again, they were stinging. The bottom of the letter was speckled with tears, blotting the ink. He folded the paper carefully, set it aside, and picked up the envelope. In the bottom right corner, split in half, was a small spiral shell. Jannik extracted the fragments and held them in his palm, using a fingernail to nudge the twin pieces together. If he squinted, the shell looked whole.

Sighing faintly, Jannik tucked the shell into his jacket pocket and then fumbled for his bag. He took out a pen and a notebook, flipping to a fresh page. How was he supposed to start—Carlos or Charlie, dear or not? He decided on Carlos as a start, before he got stuck again.

With a groan, he tossed the notebook aside and collapsed backwards onto the boxcar, his head hitting metal, a dull thunk. Didn’t knock any ideas loose. Above him, the sky was a clear cornflower blue, peppered with clouds so soft and wispy they could have been steam. Carried on the breeze, in an echo from his memory, the whistle of a daydreamer’s train and Matteo’s call to climb aboard.

Picking up the notebook again, Jannik started with what he knew best.

Charlie,

Arnaldi told a joke today I think you would like. What did the fish say when he saw an old friend that he hadn’t seen in a while? Long time no sea.

Honestly, it’s not very good, but I hope you laughed a little. It’s been hard recently. Your letters make it better.

– Jannik.

Drilled from a young age into every kid in Six: the distances by train between the districts and between every district and the Capitol. Eight hours and thirteen minutes, in fair weather, was a long time to go without saying a word, but Darren Cahill seemed just fine with the silence.

Simone had filled the initial awkward pauses with itineraries and logistics, but that well had run dry and eventually he left for his office. Elisabetta, too, fed up with their mentor’s apparent disinterest, had stormed out of the car. The crisp glide of the automatic doors opening and shutting did not make for a dramatic exit, not the way slamming something heavy might have.

That left Jannik and Darren to stare at each wordlessly from across the table. A spread of foods—sandwiches but only good for one bite, vegetables in miniature, dips served in thimble-sized bowls—had been laid out, but Jannik didn’t have the stomach to eat. Darren popped a small sandwich in his mouth without breaking eye contact. Jannik stubbornly refused to either.

“How old are you?” Darren eventually asked, after it must have become clear Jannik wasn’t going anywhere.

“Eighteen.”

Darren leaned back and sized him up with a disbelieving squint Jannik had seen before. The curls, the baby face, and the gangly limbs had never given Jannik a leg up on the schoolyard and they’d do even less for him here. With a sigh, Darren folded his arms and asked, “And how old is she?”

“Sixteen,” Jannik guessed, embarrassed he couldn’t say for sure. “Maybe seventeen?”

Pinching another sandwich, Darren muttered, “It could have been worse.”

The hangnail Jannik had been picking on his thumb tore free. Blood beaded at the wound, the skin around it inflamed. He gritted his teeth, at the pain and the dismissal. “You don’t have to be built like Sakkari or Sabalenka to win,” he argued, his heart boxing against his ribcage. “What about Medvedev?”

“Medvedev refused to die,” Darren said mildly, but Jannik noticed a shift in his expression, a spark of something more than passive interest. “So did Carlos Alcaraz. Is that how you’re willing to play it?”

Jannik cast his eyes towards the window, the tarmac flatlands of District Three speeding by in a panorama of sediment gray. Six hours from now, they’d be in the Capitol. He wondered what Medvedev or Alcaraz had thought about when they were sitting in his position, how they felt with the odds stacked at a mountainous height against them. Insurmountable, most said. Did they think they would try their best not to lose, or did they think they would do everything it took to win?

The train hurtled past an airfield, where prototypes equipped with the newest tech awaited shipment to Six. Arnaldi would be thrilled when Jannik told him. At the thought, a sharp pang reverberated in his chest.

He turned back to Darren and answered, though it terrified him how far he’d have to go to prove it was true, “I’ll do anything.”

Dear Jannik,

It is storming in Four for three days now. A blessing and a curse here! A blessing because catch is sometimes bigger when it storms this much, and a curse because it is dangerous going out on the water. My papa once worked on a fishing boat and my mama would light a candle in every window on the mornings he had to fish in a storm. He’d promise her that if it is too bad, the boats do not go out, but I can’t remember a storm season where the boats do not go out every day.

I hate storms, even rain. I do not want to be trapped inside all day. Sometimes I go to the beach anyway. It is worth getting scolded, especially today because I found a shark tooth! I hope it does not break on the way to you. You have not said anything, but I bet a few of the shells I sent broke. I can bring some bigger ones to the Capitol in a few weeks.

I mostly spend time with Juanki and Casper these past few days. Borg is inviting us all over tonight to play an old card game, poker. Have you heard of it? I am getting pretty good, but Rafa and Casper always beat the rest of us. I swear, they have the best luck.

How are things in Six? Have you met Lorenzo’s baby yet? I know you’re worried about giving them space, but I do not think they want as much as you think.

I will see you in a few weeks!

Yours,
Charlie

Their names were Luca and Elvira, Ellie to her friends. Fifteen and thirteen. Luca had hit an early growth spurt which would put him on par with most of the older boys, but Ellie looked underfed. It could have been worse, Jannik thought, the exact same thing Darren had said to him a year ago, sitting in the seat Jannik now occupied, riding in the same compartment.

It could have been worse, but what Jannik couldn’t figure out was how it might have been better.

After Simone finished giving them the rundown of what would happen when they reached the Capitol, Jannik tried encouraging them to eat. Ellie hurried to fill a plate, like Jannik was her school teacher and had handed her an assignment, but Luca stared straight out the window, monosyllabic whenever Jannik managed to prod an answer out of him.

Did he like to play sports in school? Sure. Did he know anything about wildlife? No. Ellie answered yes, but Jannik could tell she was stretching the truth. Six was a place of asphalt and steel; you had to walk for miles to find a patch of stubborn weeds, suffocating in Six’s noxious air. Forget about seeing a tree. Nothing living thrived in their district for long, even the people.

Eventually, after Ellie and Jannik had finished most of the sandwiches and Luca stopped responding to anything, Jannik let Ellie go exploring and left Luca alone. There were hundreds of things Jannik wanted to say to them. Help me help you, he’d shout at them if he thought it would make any difference. Tell me you’re going to try. As if they should have to. As if they had asked for any of this.

In the bedroom compartment where he spent most of his victory tour, Jannik had half a letter drafted to Carlos already before he remembered he’d be seeing him in a few hours. It was for the best. Everything he had written would have been too dangerous to let loose in the world. He tore the letter into pieces that he stuffed in his pocket, to burn later.

Carlos,

It snowed in Six today. I thought I wouldn’t be able to even look outside, but I didn’t feel anything. It actually looked kind of beautiful. It is a change from all the gray. Sorry I don’t have much else to write about. My mom and dad say hello. I’m not counting down or anything, but it will be nice to see you and everyone else again.

– Jannik.

His tributes carted off to their stylists and his few belongings delivered to the sixth floor, Jannik had nothing to do with himself. Darren warned him not to have too much fun at the opening night reception, but he said it with such sarcasm that Jannik wasn’t sure if he had made it up.

The answer came in the form of an Avox tasked with delivering him to a ballroom on the Tribute Center’s ground level. The room had floor-to-ceiling windows that would transform into television screens once the Tribute Parade began. In the meantime, a fleet of Avoxes ferried around the room, serving glittering glasses of champagne and hors d'oeuvres to the twenty-odd mentors and twelve escorts of the 72nd Hunger Games.

Unlike at the residence of Panem’s president, the ballroom offered few places to hide. Already, Jannik felt the eyes of several victors from Districts One and Two on him, a fresh meal to devour. Where was Carlos? He must not have shown up yet, because he would have been easy to spot otherwise, the kind of person who grabbed everyone’s attention eventually, who could have stood in a corner and still become the center of the room.

Just as Jannik planned to make a break for the bathroom, someone tapped lightly on his elbow. There at his side, Iga Świątek was smiling up at him, her gaze eager but a little hard to pin down.

“I’ve been wanting to meet you,” she said in a breathy rush, the sentiment and her excitement sounding sincere. “Hubi has told me so much about you.”

“You know Hubi?” Jannik asked, though he probably shouldn’t have been surprised. District Three was the smallest of the districts, and considering what he knew of Iga—whip-smart, introverted Iga—it made sense she and Hubi would be friends.

Jannik had met Hubi through the training they both had undertaken on the high-speed rail. District Three and District Six often worked together on transportation initiatives; Three developed the tech, while Six worked on the practicality of implementing it. Jannik had liked Hubi from the start, a nice guy who lived up to the word, with an off-beat sense of humor and a genuine love of engineering. In another life, Hubi said he would have been racing cars for a living.

When Jannik relayed that to Iga, she stifled a laugh. “I don’t know. Would he fit in the cars?”

“What would you have been doing, do you think?” Jannik asked, because Iga seemed one of the least likely to be where and who she was now.

“I don’t know,” she answered, her eyebrows pinched together as she considered it. She had a calm outward demeanor, but Jannik sensed beneath it was a mind with many gears, constantly turning. “I would have liked to tell stories, I think? It always makes me sad that the only things that get written down anymore are for training.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Good ones, I hope,” Iga joked, her laugh warbly, a little awkward. “Not sad ones, though. I’ve had enough sad stories.”

Overcome by a wave of melancholy, Jannik could do little more than nod and say roughly, “Me too.”

“Jannik!”

Both he and Iga looked in the direction of the call. As quickly as that melancholic feeling rushed up on Jannik, it receded at the sight of Carlos beaming from the threshold of the ballroom. His journey to them would likely take some time; already Novak Djokovic had intercepted Carlos for a hug. Jannik turned back to Iga and said, “He’d be a good hero for a story, you think?”

“Yes, I think so,” Iga agreed readily, only for her lips to purse as she seemed to approach it from another angle. “Well, I guess…” She paused, gathering her thoughts. “Usually the hero is the one you least expect.”

“I guess it depends, yeah, on how you frame it.” As he said it, Jannik glanced around the ballroom. All of the victors here had stories to their names—the chosen ones, the wild cards, the underdogs, the tribute no one expected to win. Narratives spun to appeal to every taste.

Iga had been the silent threat of her Games, underestimated until she became undeniable. A good reminder to the folks at home: watch out for the quiet ones, Courier had said during her winner’s interview. The audience ate it up.

Jannik reconsidered what he knew about Iga—intelligent and shy; instinctive and cool under pressure—and wondered if he was not just doing what the Capitol did, extrapolating a person from what he saw in a handful of quick interviews and during the most traumatic moments of her life. But for whatever reason, she felt more familiar than someone he had met only once. Jannik could have sworn they had known each other for years.

While he had been busy spiraling, Carlos finally completed his odyssey across the room. His smile, growing with the closing distance, almost knocked Jannik back a step. It seemed impossible for one person to possess so much happiness, but then again Carlos might not be able to contain it all. Perhaps the swelling of relief Jannik felt when Carlos ignored the hand Jannik extended and went in for a hug was the overflow.

“I am so happy to see you again,” Carlos said cheerily, without a mind to volume. Jannik might have been more embarrassed, but he noticed Iga had slipped away.

Pulling back, Jannik cleared his throat. “It’s good to see you, too,” he said, heat creeping up his neck. “Thank you for, uh…for writing me. I really look forward to your letters.”

Carlos, big hands clasped on Jannik’s shoulders, grinned. “Ay, I look forward to yours, too,” he said, which was a very forgiving lie given Jannik knew how badly his letters compared to the ones Carlos sent him.

“You both have good penmanship?” Daniil Medvedev, licking his fingers clean of an orange sauce, slotted himself seamlessly into their conversation. Unlike most of the other victors, Daniil had ditched the partywear, opting instead for a coal-colored tracksuit with a ‘12’ emblazoned on the chest. “Mine was always terrible. So bad. But I guess that could be good actually. The people in charge of reading all our mail would have lots of trouble reading mine.”

Jannik stiffened, both at Daniil’s sudden appearance and his cavalier reference to the Peacekeepers charged with riffling through their mail. He stepped out of Carlos’s hold, pretending not to notice the concern sneaking into Carlos’s smile.

“Mine is also not so good,” Carlos said, his eyes lingering on Jannik. “But Jannik has not complained yet, so it can’t be so bad.”

“All of my friends back home have bad writing also, so…” Jannik shrugged, as if what he just said explained anything. The last time he read anything of Arnaldi’s or Musetti’s would have been years ago in school. They didn’t have any reason to write to him and, even if they did, they wouldn’t write to him like Carlos did.

Daniil eyed Jannik curiously, before vaulting to an entirely different subject. “Do you think they have any more of those little cheesecake things?”

“I don’t know.” Carlos glanced around. “I can go look for us?”

Jannik almost blurted out a sharp no, but bit his tongue. He could not explain, in the presence of Daniil Medvedev, why he did not want to be alone with him. Which meant that, without a convincing excuse to prevent Carlos from leaving on a hunt for desserts, Jannik found himself in the exact position he did not want to be in—alone, with Daniil Medvedev.

He tried brainstorming a neutral topic, something innocuous and boring like the weather, but as soon as Carlos was out of earshot, Daniil said without preamble, “I did not kill anyone from your District.” He stared at him, his eyebrows arched. Expecting what, Jannik couldn’t guess.

“What—I—”

“It was Jasmine, right? And Matteo?” Daniil asked. Hearing his name, a pit opened in Jannik’s stomach, gargantuan. “I never saw them after the first day in the arena. You cannot hate me for something I had nothing to do with, okay?”

Daniil had kept his tone level, but Jannik could tell how bothered he was. His best efforts couldn’t hide the tightness in his jaw or how deeply he was breathing to maintain a measure of control. Standing this close to him, Jannik was shocked by how young he looked, how boyish.

Five years had seemed like an insurmountable age difference when Jannik was a lanky twelve and Matteo a confident seventeen, and everyone in Six said he had a chance. Look how strong he was, and so handsome. The Capitol would fall in love with him. And they had fallen for him, for his twinkling eyes and winning smile, while they jeered at Daniil, the gangly kid from a district they didn’t care about, whose flippant attitude and barely-concealed disdain for them made him perfect to hate.

In retrospect, Jannik realized the Gamemakers had done everything in their power to set the year’s golden boy and villain on a crash course for a climactic showdown. A mutant crocodile in the swamp where Daniil had hidden, an earthquake to force Matteo back towards the Cornucopia. The showdown never happened. Matteo took a wrong step, one mistake and it was over, but Daniil survived torrential downpour, the flood that followed, more mutts, and an ambush where the boy from Two shattered one of his kneecaps and broke his arm, an arm he cradled close to his chest now like someone might try to rebreak it. This time, irreparably.

“I don’t hate you,” Jannik said quietly, and found it was true.

“Good.” Daniil nodded, satisfied. He then cracked a laid-back smile, an abrupt change in demeanor that gave Jannik whiplash. “I don’t like when my friends hate me.”

Friends, easy as that. Jannik had expected a fragile truce for the sake of convenience, given how often they’d have to see each other over the next few weeks, but Daniil next snagged two glasses of champagne from a passing tray and handed one to Jannik, before launching into an off-the-cuff rant about how watered-down liquor in the Capitol was, nothing compared to the moonshine in Twelve.

“Is he torturing you?” Aryna Sabalenka appeared at his side, slinging an arm around his shoulders as though they were old friends. 

Except they had never met. The last time Jannik had seen Aryna, from a distance, was at her victory tour visit to Six. Constricted in the gladiatorial-inspired garb synonymous with Two, she had recited her Capitol-approved speech stiffly but with a brave face. At the end, when she tried to smile at a flock of children crowded at the edge of the stage, one of the boys spat at her shoes. As the Peacekeepers ushered her off to blistering silence, she was shaking, like a great tree felled and just about to fall.

This Aryna seemed like an altogether different person, dressed in pale pink gossamer, holding a dish of strawberries, a champagne flute in hand, smiling broadly, and cracking jokes at Daniil’s expense. Jannik liked her, really liked her. She had brought Carlos back with her, and he obviously liked Aryna, too. Every joke of hers made him belly laugh. With each laugh, he laid a hand on Jannik’s shoulder, needing his steadying.

Ons soon came to join them, Maria and Naomi tagging along. “Save us from Becker,” she whispered, ducking to hide behind Daniil.

The conversation continued to flow steadily, much like the champagne from two bottles Daniil and Aryna commandeered because they wanted to manage the glass top-offs themselves. They gossiped about Becker, apparently bragging to anyone who would listen about his tribute. Everyone skirted around sharing anything about their own. The others started asking each other when they’d be going down to what Maria mockingly named the circus—“Where the Capitol casts their bets,” she explained to Jannik and Carlos—to woo sponsors. Going early, according to Ons, was the trick.

In Daniil’s opinion, a waste of time. “I have Mentor on Mentor tomorrow anyway,” he added with a tossed-off shrug.

“Grigor?” Aryna asked, sighing soft and dreamy.

“Sharapova.”

Maria huffed a laugh. “I may have to watch that one.”

“I’m waiting for them to stick you with Tsitsipas,” Naomi said, her smile subtle but suggesting a familiar joke. The tension Jannik had observed between Daniil and Stefanos at the victory party hadn’t been a one-off then and not a well-kept or respected secret either.

Daniil shot an irritated look across the room to where Stefanos was talking animatedly at a cornered del Potro. “You will be waiting a long time.”

“Can’t you two just be friends?” Maria asked in playful frustration. As one of only three living victors from Eight, she must spend a great deal of time with Stefanos and hear plenty about Medvedev.

“No one wants us to be friends,” Daniil said, with an undercurrent of bitterness out of step with the stakeless teasing. Either no one else caught on or they all elected to ignore it. Jannik glanced sideways at Carlos, but he was smiling along, his eyes volleying between everyone in the circle, oblivious.

“I want you to be friends,” Ons protested, raising her hand as though they had called a vote.

With a head shake both amused and fond, Naomi said, “Aw, you just want everyone to be friends.”

“Yes,” Ons said without shame, “what is wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” came Carlos, answering a rhetorical question. His hand had migrated back to Jannik’s shoulder, his thumb on his shirt collar and hovering millimeters from his bare skin. The air in that scant bit of space seemed electrified.

“Oh no.” Aryna pitched her head back, unleashing a dramatic groan. “We’ve got another one.”

She exchanged a suffering look with Maria. Together, they mourned, “So nice.”

“Another two, I think,” Naomi said, her soft but shrewd eyes flicking between Carlos and Jannik, the point where they connected, a closed-circuit of contact.

As Jannik opened his mouth to object, Daniil cut in with, “What, am I not a nice guy?”

Carlos reached around Ons to give Daniil a consolatory pat on the back. “Very nice,” he said, too seriously to be anything other than sincere. Everyone in their circle burst out laughing, Daniil included. The rest of the ballroom bent in their direction, drifting towards the new center of gravity.

The affinity Jannik experienced while talking to Iga had returned. He liked laughing with these people, because he got the sense they knew what a rare and precious resource laughter was. Was that the shortcut to intimacy, he wondered, living through parallel traumas, coming away with different but equal scars? He’d have to spend the rest of his life holding his family’s hands through what it felt like being in the arena, without a guarantee they’d ever really understand, but he wouldn’t have to waste a second explaining it to anyone here. If he was a monster, so were they. If they were still painfully human, so was he.

Dear Jannik,

I’m sorry I have not written in a while! I have been having trouble sleeping the last few days. For me, the nightmares are like the storms here. We have many days of blue skies and everything is okay, and even you think about what if it never stormed again, but then everyone notices a change in the air and we know another one is coming. They are not always too bad or long, but I never want them. I go a week, even sometimes two without nightmares, but then I have a bad feeling right before bed and I know.

I hope it is okay I’m telling you this. That is one of the reasons I have not been writing. Waiting until the storm has passed and things are clear. Not everyone likes to talk about their nightmares, like Rafa and Bjorn. Casper and I talk about them sometimes and Juanki says I can always come to him, so no pressure for you to share anything you do not want to! But if you want to talk about nightmares or anything, I’m here.

Everything else in Four is good! My mama wants me to ask you about your mom. Does she cook? Mama says since all she seems to do is cook now, she would like to trade recipes. She also says I am hopeless in the kitchen. I try not to burn things, but it is easy to get distracted!

How are things in Six? How is Lorenzo and Veronica’s baby? If there is any way to send a picture, I would love to see him!

Two months and thirteen days until Holger’s victory party.

Yours,
Charlie

How did days pass in Six—to the tune of an electric hum. 

Jannik had never noticed the steadfastness of the hum until after he had returned from his first trip to the Capitol, where he experienced true silence. He loved the staticky frizzle of the hum for filling a void, but equally he hated it because now he understood nothing in Six was natural, and then he wondered what it would be like to fall asleep to the cymbal crash of ocean waves instead.

Before, he slept easy, anywhere, sprawled with all his limbs extending in different directions. His father had joked he outgrew everything—pants, doorways, other people, but especially beds. Jannik would wake up with half a leg dangling over the footboard, one arm draped to the floor, and with drool stains on two different pillows. “Who will put up with this?” his mother tutted fondly.

No one, as it turned out.

On the nights he managed to sleep now, he curled into himself as he had to in the arena. Under a moonless sky, full dark, terrified to keep a fire burning and terrified to freeze to death. Legs accordioned to his chest, frost-bitten fingers tucked into his coat and cupped near his neck as if he were contemplating choking himself. They all must have looked like small, wounded prey animals, trembling in the cold, wretched and miserable and waiting to die. What quality entertainment.

He tossed, turned to his side, got halfway to crushing his knees to his chest, then flipped onto his back. He stretched his arms out, straight as an axle rod, as wide as his wingspan allowed. The tips of his fingers did not reach the edges of the bed; it was sized to fit three, which seemed a cruel amount of space to expect just one person to fill. On the ceiling above him were splashed pools of golden light. Nothing in the Capitol was natural either. He listened for the whir of machinery, anything built by human hands, but heard silence. The machinery of his body beat staccato in his ears.

Two floors below him was Carlos. Sleeping, he hoped. Thinking of him made Jannik think of the ocean. On his back and with his arms open, a floating pose, he tried to listen for the sea, even knowing it was very far away.

Charlie,

I hope this gets to you before Reaping Day. I know I don’t have any right to ask you this, but if there is any way—

Never mind. It is just hitting me that you won’t be there this time, but that is going to happen more often than not, isn’t it? This will be good first practice. I don’t even know what I’m writing. You can tell probably.

I hope you are alright.

– Jannik.

The morning of the first training day, Jannik tried to impart the same practical wisdom Darren had given him. “Just, uh…go to the survival skills sections first,” he said. “You’re going to need those more than the weapons stuff.”

Ellie, smothering a biscuit with butter, nodded distractedly. Luca said nothing.

“I just feel like I already failed them,” Jannik confided to Carlos, who had met him outside the Tribute Center a little after eleven so they could walk to the betting concourse together. Jannik didn’t know how to ask for money from these people, even though finding sponsors for Luca and Ellie was perhaps the only thing within his control.

“We have time,” Carlos assured him, again coupling them together. His successes could be Jannik’s, Jannik’s failures also his.

“Did you get the message from Capitol TV this morning?” Jannik asked, veering to a new subject. His face felt flushed and he couldn’t blame it on the morning sun shining off the rose-colored glass of the skyscrapers. Every surface in the Capitol was designed to be reflective, mirroring only what was on the outside and revealing nothing of what lay within.

Carlos was the opposite. In his face, Jannik saw everything he felt. Maybe that was dangerous, always leaving the blinds to his heart open and letting anyone see what could hurt him, what he loved, but Jannik liked him so much for it. How his eyes blew up in excitement when he said, “About Mentor on Mentor, yes? I have a feeling it would be us, together.”

While Jannik didn’t say as much, he had a feeling, too. It made sense, pairing two of the newest mentors. Jannik had scanned through the list of prewritten questions and most were about first impressions of their tributes, first piece of advice they gave, first true test they thought they passed as a mentor, a cascade of firsts to frame as triumphs.

The question Jannik wanted to answer the least was the most personal: the first time he and Carlos met. He didn’t want to turn that memory over to Capitol, for their careless hands to mishandle and reshape.

“Do you think it will take very long?” Jannik asked, overwhelmed by both the myriad of ways the interview could go off the rails and the circus they had stepped into, unarmed and underprepared.

The betting concourse was a parade of hats plumed with dyed peacock feathers and sequined coats shimmering neon in the light, so much to draw the eye that nothing did. Above the counter where the Capitolites cast their bets, a large board tracked the live odds of all twenty-four tributes. A brutal shiver raced down his spine to see them reduced to a name, a district, an age, a weight, and the likelihood they’d live. Last year, his name had been up there, replaced now by Luca sitting at 16-1. Ellie, 30-1.

Panic, ice-cold, began shutting down his nervous system. He couldn’t do this. He could not talk to these puppet people guffawing, dabbing morphling on their tongues, and putting down more money than his family used to see in a year on a boy or girl they’d deride for dying and losing them a bet. He had to leave, hop a train heading north or south, west to one coast or east to another, who cared as long as it carried him far away from here. His hand grasped the air, in need of something, something sharp—

A sure hand, warm but not stifling, rested between his shoulder blades, anchoring him. “Want to eat?”

Jannik realized he was hardly breathing, his exhales coming out in juddering puffs like the spitting of an old radiator. It required a few deep breaths through his nose for him to manage a wheezy, “Huh?”

“I’m hungry,” Carlos declared, though breakfast in the Tribute Center had been served less than an hour ago. He started guiding Jannik toward the fringes of the concourse where a number of food stalls had opened for business. “Let’s eat first.”

From a starry-eyed vendor, Carlos ordered a short stack of waffles dolloped with hefty peaks of orange whipped cream. The side of strawberries he placed in front of Jannik once they sat down. The table he had scouted for them was beside a genetically-mutated willow tree, the leaves a rich crimson, dripping from the branches like tears. It didn’t take long for Jannik to notice why he chose that particular table; the willow obscured the view of the betting counter and the board.

After another round of deep breaths, Jannik took a strawberry. Carlos nudged his plate toward him. When Jannik shook his head—he didn’t anticipate even the strawberry tasting good—Carlos nudged again and pointed to the orange cream. Knowing he’d not give up, Jannik relented and scooped the strawberry through one of the peaks.

“Good, yeah?” Carlos asked after Jannik popped the strawberry in his mouth.

Still chewing, Jannik nodded. He hadn’t registered the taste, only how happy Carlos seemed to have gotten him to try it.

“As good as the oranges at home?” Jannik asked, a detail recalled from one of Carlos's letters.

Carlos shook his head vehemently. “No, never. I wish I can send you some.”

Jannik swallowed around an unexpected lump in his throat, tasting the last hint of orange. “I know,” he said quietly, another detail folded into his letters. Carlos wanted to send him everything, show him everything, share with him everything, and sometimes Jannik drafted a letter back that just asked, why. Why him? What made Jannik special, worthy of any of it?

He never sent those letters. He hid them, along with many others, in a bottom drawer, wasting paper, a luxury he could now afford to waste.

Because he refused to waste food, Jannik took another strawberry and bit into it before the juices stained his fingers too badly. Over Carlos’s shoulder, he saw Stefanos Tsitsipas heading in their direction, Daniil walking behind him at a casual but calculated distance.

“Mind if I sit?” Stefanos asked. He had a dish of pink yogurt topped with a careful arrangement of rose petals. Carlos scooted over on his bench to make room. Once seated, Stefanos introduced himself to Jannik, offering his hand to shake. Stefanos seemed to have trouble maintaining eye contact, his eyes skirting away a split-second after their hands clasped.

“He knows who you are.” Daniil, without asking permission, swung his legs over the bench on Jannik’s side and claimed the seat. He was in the same tracksuit he had been wearing the night before, rumpled like he had slept in it. For his second breakfast, he had a plateful of eggs, three flaky pastries oozing chocolate sauce, and a side of toast slathered in jam, which he unladed onto Jannik. Shrugging off Jannik’s questioning glance, he said, “I hate strawberry.”

“It was polite,” Stefanos said, picking at a conversational thread Daniil had dropped.

Jannik tore a corner off a piece of toast, eyeing Stefanos and Daniil warily.

“Have you talked to any of them yet?” Daniil asked brusquely, acting as though Stefanos had not spoken. He scanned the crowds of Capitol citizens, a derisive pinch to his frown.

Jannik shook his head, in unison with Carlos.

“It’s not so bad,” Stefanos piped in. “I just try to pretend I’m talking to someone back home.”

“Easy for you,” Daniil argued, a bite of egg lodged in his cheek. “You’re used to the clothes.”

The dig at the creamy sateen poncho Stefanos was wearing, not quite Capitol but not district either, did not register to Stefanos, but then again, Daniil might have been referring to the textile industry of Eight. The conversation moved naturally to Stefanos describing life back in his district, fielding interested questions from Carlos and the occasional awkward one from Jannik. Daniil rolled his eyes at most of what Stefanos said, but had shifted his focus from commentating to shoveling eggs into his mouth. The simplicity of the conversation, coupled with Stefanos’s slow and rambling way of talking, always just shy of the point, soothed some of Jannik’s jangled nerves. So did the food. At one point, he had reached for another strawberry, only to come up empty. He had eaten through the entire bowl.

Across the table, Carlos was nominally listening to Stefanos but kept stealing glances at Jannik. When he saw Jannik looking back, his eyes widened into eclipsed moons, but then he smiled, something warm and private. The rest of the concourse faded away, as though they had carved a moment for themselves outside of time and space, and, safe within it, Jannik allowed himself a tentative smile back.

“Now, this is a fun group!” Novak Djokovic declared. His entrance into their orbit was effortless and sent Jannik crashing straight back down to earth.

He had met Djokovic all of once, during the stop in Two along his victory tour. They had shaken hands, calloused palm to calloused palm, Djokovic had congratulated him without evident malice or sarcasm, and Jannik had fought against an urge to bow his head in deference. Underneath the deference, fear. Though just two when Djokovic won his Games, Jannik grew up with the stories, already on the road into legend. In Two, he imagined they cast him as the hero.

Hero or otherwise, Novak Djokovic had a mythic aura about him and everyone at the table showed signs of its effects. Stefanos had sat up straighter, his shoulders drawn back. Even Daniil looked more alert. Though the hands Djokovic had placed on his shoulders made it awkward, Carlos twisted around until he could see enough of him to smile.

“We thought it would be Andy this year,” Daniil said conversationally.

Djokovic shook his head, a flash of pain alighting his face. “The hip again,” he said, to which Daniil and Stefanos both winced. A tick Jannik had been picking up on—allusions to injuries sustained in the arena produced an echo of pain in other victors. He wondered, with a stab of fear, how that translated to watching the Games after coming out on the other side of them.

“Agassi did not want to give it a try?” Stefanos asked, the lightness of his tone clashing with the murderous glare Daniil sent him from across the table.

“Ah, no, but maybe next year with Steffi,” Djokovic answered, and Jannik noticed how careful he was not to look at Daniil. “Now”—he clapped Carlos’s shoulders, jostling him; Carlos only beamed—“Time to begin this madness again. Let me know if you want any pointers.”

His hands were on Carlos, but his eyes were on Jannik. He looked and sounded genuine, eager even to help. Opening his mouth but finding it dry, Jannik nodded quickly instead. Later he imagined Djokovic would find someone to ask what essential gear had broken inside Jannik Sinner’s brain and when.

Djokovic left in the direction of the concourse, and Jannik watched him go, attention arrested. Everything about him seemed to go against the grain of what he had expected.

“Is Novak Djokovic…” Jannik continued tracking his movements across the concourse, observing the jubilant way he greeted past victor and Capitol bettor alike. A hearty handshake here, a friendly slap on the back there—no one passed him by without an acknowledgement. “…nice?”

Daniil and Stefanos exchanged an indecipherable look, but Carlos nodded earnestly. “He is great,” he enthused, somewhat muffled, his mouth stuffed with the last of his waffles. “He offer me some, uh, some advice, yesterday. People betting first or second time, yeah? They are more likely also to give money for sponsor gifts.”

“He is not crazy,” Stefanos tacked on with an absentminded shrug.

Daniil snorted, a mean sound. The steely-eyed edge to how he glared at Stefanos returned. “Yes, but not as sane as your precious Federer.”

Stefanos scowled and shoved the last bite of his yogurt into his mouth. “You, of all people,” he spoke shortly after swallowing, rising to Daniil’s bait, “should be grateful to Roger.”

“Grateful,” Daniil repeated snidely, his lip curled, “there is a big word, Stefanos.”

While endeavoring to look anywhere but at Daniil or Stefanos, Jannik noticed many of the bettors keenly spectating the mounting argument. He had known the citizens of the Capitol loved to keep up with the victors, but naively he hadn’t assumed the interest extended as far as petty dramas. How much more of his life would they mine for entertainment, and was there any vein too deep? Did they want to know what he had for breakfast that morning, how many nights that week he had woken up screaming, who of the other victors he liked, who he hated, when he expected to fall in love? His skin crawled to consider it.

He tuned back into the argument just for a distraction, but Stefanos seemed to have had enough. “I don’t know what you get out of this,” he was saying to Daniil as he stood. He draped his jacket over his arm, squeezing Carlos’s shoulder briefly. Then he nodded to Jannik and said, “It was nice to meet you officially.”

“Such a kid,” Daniil muttered, watching Stefanos weave his way out of the concourse and ignore anyone who tried to flag him down. After a minute of stewing in a silence Jannik and Carlos did not have the courage to break, he stormed off in the same direction, leaving without his empty plate, his pastries, or a goodbye.

After Daniil turned a corner and disappeared from sight, Jannik observed under his breath, “They must really hate each other.”

He hadn’t meant for anyone to overhear the comment, but Ons, sliding into one of the newly-vacated seats, asked immediately,  “Who, Daniil and Stefanos?” Before he could confirm or deny it, she shook her head. “No, no, it is much more complicated than that. Trust me.”

Jannik did her trust. She’d know the history of Daniil and Stefanos better than he did. “Why would Daniil be grateful to Roger?” he asked, choosing one small piece he’d like fitted into the puzzle.

“Ah.” Ons folded her arms on the table, a storyteller’s position. Instinctively, Jannik leaned in closer, as did Carlos. “You know who Andre Agassi is?”

Jannik and Carlos nodded in tandem. Andre Agassi had won his Games years before either Jannik or Carlos were born, but his marriage to Steffi Graff, a legendary victor of District Two, was the subject of many fluff pieces in the Capitol news cycle. Such a beloved love story, Agassi had been allowed to defect from Twelve to Two for her.

“Agassi has not gone back to mentor tributes from Twelve since he married Steffi and moved to Two,” Ons explained. “And since there were no other victors from Twelve before Daniil, victors from One and Two used to volunteer. Usually Roger.”

“So, he mentored Daniil, yes?” Carlos asked.

“And now Daniil has to mentor every year by himself,” Jannik added, running cold with anger on Daniil’s behalf. Shafted by someone from his own district would have been bad enough, but he had won against all odds and his reward was returning every year to mentor two terrified kids alone while the man who should have been his partner excused himself from sharing any of the burden.

The question Stefanos posed to Djokovic might not have been so innocent. It was possible he felt the injustice of what Agassi was doing as strongly as Jannik did.

And as strongly as Ons, her face as close to furious as Jannik suspected he’d see. She was the only living victor of District Nine, the same as Darren had once been the only living victor of Six. Jannik could not begin to imagine the toll it took, year in and year out. Not only the annual trip to the Capitol, but the rest of the year spent in a place that once had been home, where no one shared your experience and few could stand to hear about it, rendered a stranger to everyone and everything you once knew. Jannik was lucky, in that one infinitesimal way. He had Darren as a lifeline. Darren, and Carlos’s letters.

“It’s good, right,” Jannik said, punctuated with a flimsy period. His eyes darted to Carlos, who was watching him attentively. He looked back to Ons, needing her to give him the certainty he lacked. “All of us working together, being friends.”

“It’s good.” Ons confirmed, her expression softening. She swiped one of Daniil’s forgotten pastries, then offered the two remaining on the plate to Jannik and Carlos. “Sometimes, at least for me, it feels like we’re all we have.”

Again, Jannik locked eyes with Carlos. He looked reassured, but finding and appreciating silver linings came more easily to him than to Jannik. Staving off a frown, Jannik bit into his pastry. The chocolate inside tasted two parts bitter, one part sweet.

Dear Jannik,

Happy orange season! I do not know how much you learn about the other districts in Six (Not a lot? In Four, we are encouraged to drop out by fourteen to go work at the marinas, so our lessons are all about fishing), but a smaller industry here is oranges and they are ready to harvest!

Everyone loves orange season because there are more jobs and because oranges (the ugly ones is what Papa says) start showing up in the markets. They may be ugly, but they always taste delicious! And many things people call ugly are not really ugly, are they? They are just different.

By the time orange season is over, a lot of people are sick of orange everything, but I never am. If I could eat an orange every day of my life, I would.

My family sends love and we wish we could send some oranges, too. How is everything in Six? Do you have special seasons there?

Yours,
Charlie

The set for Mentor on Mentor was housed in the same complex where the tribute interviews were held. Around the room, small to maximize a sense of intimacy but glass-walled and bright, employees of Capitol TV were fine-tuning the lights, painstakingly adjusting the position of two sleek, high-backed chairs set in front of the windows, pouring glasses of sparkling water, adding plants only to shuttle them away, whispering into headsets, and constantly checking in with Jannik to see if he needed anything, coffee, tea, a white pill the size of a sugar granule.

His interview before the Games had happened, so it seemed, through magic. Jannik had not seen anyone from the Capitol in the wings during the interviews, only his fellow tributes waiting their turns and Jim Courier on stage reigning alone, but behind the curtain were the people in the room today, whose jobs it was to raise the levels on the girl from Eleven’s microphone because her voice never rose above a trembling whisper and to dim the stage lights when the boy from Seven began to tell the story of a sick younger sibling back home. A well-oiled engine, not magic, ran the show.

Jannik, in his black-chrome suit and wearing a badge demarcating him as talent, was now one of the engine’s many cylinders, expected to fire at the turn of the ignition.

Immediate relief, a stronger drug than anything he had been offered, hit him when Carlos arrived, fifteen minutes late. His stylist had continued the tradition of fitting the tributes and victors of Four in exclusively blue. The shade today was a serene aquamarine, as Jannik pictured the ocean must look at sunrise.

Carlos tugged at his shirt collar, his throat straining against the high neckline. “Blue is not my color.”

“What is?” Jannik asked, overwhelmed by curiosity. Everything about Carlos interested him.

“Orange.” His eyes drifted upwards, his lips splitting into a grin. “Like your hair.”

“Ha, ha,” Jannik intoned, but what he meant as sarcasm came underlaid with genuine laughter.

Never one to pass up a chance to laugh, Carlos joined in. Jannik saw Carlos’s fingers twitching at his side, and, as if caught up in the current of the moment, he reached up, his fingers dancing in the air inches from Jannik’s hair.

Inside his head, his brain was spinning out, but Jannik did not move away.

“Can I…”

“This is good stuff, boys,” the producer cut in, through putting the finishing touches on the set decor. “Let’s get it on camera.”

Swallowing around his disappointment, Jannik went along with the familiar motions of receiving his mic, getting a last puff of powder to his forehead, and being shepherded into his seat. The cameras made him nervous, but at least this interview would not be live, and he had Carlos in the seat opposite his.

“So, Jannik,” he started, beaming.

“So, uh, Carlos,” Jannik parroted back. He tried responding in kind to his smile, but it just left him feeling awkward and fraudulent. He glanced behind the cameras, hoping for some direction, but the producers were studying the monitors.

“First time is the charm, eh?” Carlos breezed onwards, drawing Jannik’s focus back to him. He was looking at Jannik the same as he always did in rooms without cameras.

“I hope so,” Jannik said, hardly rising above a mumble. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw someone cranking their thumb in an upward motion, but he told himself not to pay attention to anyone but Carlos. That was how they would soldier through this.

“So, Jannik,” Carlos said a second time, both of them broken records, “what has been your favorite part of the, uh…” His brow furrowed trying to remember the question’s exact wording. “Your favorite part of the mentoring process so far?”

“The train ride,” Jannik answered automatically.

“Because Six makes the trains, yeah?” Carlos asked, laughing.

“Maybe a little,” Jannik admitted, an understatement. The only reason his answer had a sliver of truth to it was because the train held a trace of home. “But it’s where I got to first meet the…my tributes, Luca and Elvira.” He had to fold his hands beneath thighs to keep from fidgeting with his fingers. “Ellie, actually. Her friends call her Ellie.”

“Like my friends call me Charlie,” Carlos said meaningfully. “Or Carlitos.”

I know, Jannik thought, except it had been over six months of letters exchanged and he still couldn’t bring himself to address his to Charlie. Maybe after these Games ended, he’d endeavor to try. He might feel he earned the use of the nickname, the title it bestowed him.

Jannik cleared his throat, his turn to pose a question. “So, Carlos—”

“Charlie,” Carlos corrected. “For my friends, remember?”

“Charlie,” Jannik repeated, and when he smiled this time, nothing about it was fake.

“Great, boys, really great,” interrupted the producer, one headphone off his ear. “Everyone is going to love this. We’re just going to run back that first question. Jannik: do you mind saying the Opening Ceremony was your favorite part so far?”

He had replaced his headphone before Jannik answered flatly, “Sure.”

“Oh, and can you have your hands back on your lap? Just for continuity.”

Jannik put his hands back on his lap. Every nail on both hands had been torn down to the quick.

The room reset. Carlos prompted him with the same question, word perfect on the second go-around but the enthusiasm halved. As requested, Jannik answered that the Opening Ceremony was his favorite part of mentoring so far and tacked on a hollow compliment to Six’s costumes, though the misguided metal plating had turned Luca and Ellie into faceless beacons of refracted light. The producer flashed him a thumbs-up, satisfied.

With permission to carry on, Jannik asked Carlos, “What’s been your favorite part?”

“Same as you, the Opening Ceremony,” Carlos said, and Jannik wondered if it was true. Everyone was capable of lying, especially in an environment covered by a permanent smoke screen, but Jannik had come to view Carlos as someone essentially honest, who lied only with his back against the wall. Sometimes, not even then.

But Jannik feared discovering he had taken a fictional version of Carlos at face value. Not because he’d view it as a betrayal, but because he would hate if the reverse were true, to find out Carlos thought of him as the stoic, unaffected, deceivingly-ruthless person everyone else there believed him to be. If he had gotten Carlos wrong from the start, Carlos deserved to despise him for it, but what would Jannik do if Carlos never wrote to him again?

He read his letters like they possessed the anecdote to insanity, and he read them like the blueprints to the rooms, attics, basements, and crawl spaces that made up the house of Carlos’s soul. Mapped on to them, the old shanty songs he loved to hum to himself on the roof while he gazed out at the ocean, the foods he cooked in the kitchen with his mother despite how she lamented his total lack of skill, the bed where he woke up from nightmares of that boy, his knife, the things that couldn’t be saved. Jannik had to know him. He had to, and Carlos had to know him, too.

Because before Carlos asked another question, he added with the smile Jannik dared to think he reserved for him, “But also I like the train.”

That night, Jannik watched the interview through the slots in his fingers, just to see if they had kept in Carlos’s small act of rebellion. They had. Because it was Carlos, and they adored him and would do anything to bask in his sun a little longer, but no one would know, not really, that the answer had been for Jannik. That was theirs for keeps.

Carlos,

Tell Bjorn thank you for the rules to the poker game. Arnaldi is terrible and says we cannot play with real money again. I had not seen him this mad since we used to play stickball when we were kids. He was bad at that, too. First he blamed Matteo’s pitching. Then it was mine. It’s okay. I think we were all pretty sore losers back then.

Do you know any other games?

– Jannik.

The show lights beat down on him, hot enough to trigger heat stroke. What did they do if a tribute died before the Games began? It had happened before, he knew, but the details of how the Gamemakers dealt with the premature deaths were murky, lost to rewritten history.

The other tributes would be relieved if Jannik died halfway through his interview. One less of them to contend with, one man down. The live audience would be scandalized initially, but later thrilled at the story they’d have to tell at parties. Didn’t you know, they’d shoehorn into small talk, I was there when that boy from Five—or, Six? Yes, Six, I think. Well, I was there when his brain melted to goo out of his nose.

Boiling alive proved less painful than Jannik assumed it might be, but ringing in his ears was a sharp hiss like a tea kettle whistle, a warning. Jim had his high-wattage smile trained on him, waiting for an answer. Jannik had forgotten the question.

“This Mr. Musetti, is he a friend, a relative, a…”

Lorenzo, they wanted him to talk about Lorenzo.

“He was, uh…” Forgetting about the pound of product in his hair, Jannik went to run his fingers through his curls, cringed at the crunchy texture, and self-consciously wiped his sweaty hand on his pants. Somewhere backstage, Darren must be kneading his forehead with his fists. “He is my friend. One of my oldest.”

The audience cooed, artificially sweet. With the lights glaring in his eyes, Jannik could make out only the shadows of faces, the features distorted into expressions sinister and monstrous. His stomach turned and again he missed half of Jim’s question.

“…a pact? Or did it all happen in the moment?”

The moment had arrived, the one he and Darren had rehearsed for tirelessly. “You either have to make them laugh or make them cry,” Darren had drilled into him, and Jannik would go on to tell Luca and Ellie the same. Whatever opened the tear ducts worked, whether true or false, fact or fiction.

“It was very, uh…” Jannik called up Musetti’s face, slackened in disbelief at what he had done. His face morphed into Matteo’s, shocked at the mistake he had made, surprise the last thing he felt. Losing his grasp on his composure, Jannik balled his hands into fists and tried to push forward. “It was in the moment, but I—I lost a friend, a few years ago. I lost…his name was Matteo Berrettini.”

The name extorted a soft murmur, a few muted gasps of recollection, and the heat of the stage lights suddenly had nothing on the rage boiling beneath Jannik’s skin. Infuriated that his name rang such a faint bell, that anyone who did remember might claim to mourn him. As if that face, that miserable shock, haunted their dreams, as if his death had cast a long shadow over their lives.

“I couldn’t—” His voice cracked down the middle, without him having to fake it like he and Darren had practiced. Rage, not grief, leaked through the fissure, but what did it matter, since the audience couldn’t tell the difference. “I can’t lose anyone else.”

He exited the stage to heavy applause, his head bowed to conceal his furious tears. In the wing, he blew past the girl from Seven, primed for her entrance.

“Jannik.”

Leylah called his name like she wasn't sure she had a right to it.

“Was all of that true?” she asked. “About your friend?” As she tottered in her heels, her dress rustled. The leaves of the dress changed from a vibrant green to burnt orange, orange fading into a woody brown, the full annual cycle of a tree.

“It was true.” Jannik wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, his knuckles coming away streaked with lines of mascara.

“I’m sorry.”

Leylah seemed about to say something else, but then Courier announced her name, her turn under the spotlight. As she strode to meet Jim center stage, a few leaves fell from her dress and fluttered in her wake. Jannik stayed to see her shake Jim’s hand and take a seat, but left the wing before the first question. She had been sorry for his loss, but also sorry she would have to disregard how human it made him come tomorrow. He was sorry he was too much of a coward to learn anything more about her.

Dear Jannik,

I went to the beach with Casper today so he can swim even though it is still winter technically and cold. Cold for me. You and Casper do not think anything above fifty is cold, but it is to me! I go anyway because I have been bored around the house, but if I tell Mama that a list of chores will appear on my bed next morning.

Is it bad I miss the Capitol a little? I don’t miss…the work, but I miss talking to everyone. It is exciting hearing about different places and people, like the stories Stefanos tells us about how silk is made in Eight or Daniil and the Covey performances in Twelve. I want to see how cars are built. I know you say our houses must look the same, but still I want you to show me around yours. We can’t decorate the same. We are similar but not that similar!

I think I write all this because I’m sad how long it will be until I see you again. A year is too long. Letters are good, but they are not everything.

Sorry this is not a good letter. Please tell me something else about how trains or cars work.

Yours,
Charlie

“Medvedev is going to let us on the roof tonight. You should come.”

Novak had the sort of natural authority that turned friendly invitations into subtle commands, so at midnight, the clock marshaling the country into the first day of the Games, Jannik joined the usual suspects in the lobby, waiting on Daniil to bring them up to the twelfth floor. Next to him, because he always migrated to his side eventually, Carlos was chatting happily with Iga about, of all things, kites.

Tomorrow, they would watch the bloodbath from their individual floors. According to Maria, those whose tributes died early would commiserate at an underground bar nearby. The mentors with tributes who had clung to life would see each other at the bettors concourse, but not speak. Tonight would be their last as friends; for as long as the Games went on, they would be rivals, just without the confines of an arena.

From the top of the Tribute Center, the Capitol could have passed for beautiful, a city of glass shimmering like moonlight reflecting off the surface of a lake, mesmerizing in its serenity. A firework shot off, breaking the stillness and reminding him everyone else in the city was throwing a party, that what the constructed dignity masked was the vicious anticipation of what would happen next.

His eyes drifted to the stars. Not until the arena did he understand why people sought comfort in the knowledge that the stars they saw were the same stars someone else was looking at, thousands of miles away. The Gamemakers engineered false skies for their arenas, projections on a force field. Those indifferent stars he had slept beneath for three endless weeks had been pale imitations, but these stars were the stars of home and there was nothing the Capitol could do to alter them.

A shooting star blazed across the sky, brilliant and brief. Jannik missed his chance to close his eyes, but still squeezed in a wish.

Carlos bumped his elbow against Jannik’s, drawing his gaze from the sky. “What did you wish for?”

Someday soon, Jannik hoped not to be thrown off-kilter every time Carlos proved how well he could read him, but he wasn’t used to having someone effortlessly see past his unassuming cover. Stoic, the Capitol commentators had dubbed him. He never thought the paralyzing fear of saying the wrong thing, looking the wrong way, could be made to sound dignified.

That fear, not the fear his wish wouldn’t come true if he voiced it, tripped his tongue. Jannik had wished for his tribute to survive, but how could he admit to that when wishing for Ellie or Luca to live was as good as wishing for the tributes of every other mentor to die. All he knew was there had to be a way to stop feeling this guilty, guilt like tar slowly coating his lungs, and if he brought Ellie or Luca home, maybe he would be allowed one unencumbered breath before it started over again.

The same time next year, he’d be back on the roof and know better. That all of it—the mentoring, the interviews, the betting, the parties, the bottomless bottles of champagne—was an extension of a game that never ended. If you were on the board, you had already lost.

He’d be back on the roof, and Holger Rune would take his turn learning the lesson, and the one thing Jannik had to look forward to, the one thing he had that felt like his and not Capitol cruelty packaged as compensation, was in District Four, because his district produced enough victors for them to schedule their torture session for every other year.

Poor Ons, her district’s sole living victor. Poor Medvedev, too, who only laughed when Jannik mistakenly implied he pitied him. Better than what Jannik thought he’d do: attempt to throw him off a force-fielded building. If anyone could have found a way, it would be him.

“It makes me seem like such a good guy,” Daniil said, his sardonic smile a crooked slash across his face. “But I’d drag Agassi back here if I could. Maybe I kill him. What has he ever done for me, huh?” He glanced off, cracking his knuckles. Blood the color of rust flaked off one of the cuts there. “But also, what have I ever done for anyone?”

But Jannik didn’t know yet. He stared at Carlos, trying to come up with a different wish. The only other real one he had he couldn’t confess either.

“Don’t worry,” Carlos said. He laid a hand on his wrist. “Me too.”

Shoulders nestled together, they stayed at the ledge for what seemed like hours, never seeing another shooting star. Jannik had a different wish, the least likely to come true. He wished it on the next firework instead, something impossible pinned on something illusory.

Under his breath, “Anywhere else.”

“What’s that?” Carlos leaned closer. His hair brushed against Jannik’s jaw.

“Nothing.”

The firework faded out, his wish with it, leaving behind just a shadow of smoke.

Charlie,

Holger’s train gets in tomorrow morning. Darren and I have been told by the mayor we should be there at ten to greet him. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. Congratulations, I guess.

I don’t remember meeting you in Four during my victory tour. Maybe this is the part where you tell me we shook hands and had a ten minute conversation and how could I forget all about it, but I really think I would have remembered if we did.

– Jannik.

Be quick, he had told them. The cannon would sound, and then bolt off the platform and book it to the closest place offering cover. Forget the shit at the Cornucopia; it would cost you your neck or someone else’s. Be quick, because in the arena, there was always something or someone waiting for you to stumble. One wrong step, Darren reminded him, had killed even the Capitol favorites.

(But Jannik had stumbled. Fallen to his knees with the cannon fire, which had shaken the arena and turned it into a snow globe. Jannik had to shield his eyes from the swirling snow while scrambling to get back to his feet. Something had sailed over his head, a small hatchet he had scooped up as he ran for the tree line. Had he been a split second faster to rise, the blade would have driven through his skull. If he hadn’t fallen at all, it would have lodged in his back.

In the forest, confused to be alive, he had thrown up in a hollowed log.)

Be quick, he had told them. The cannon would sound, and then quick off the platform and run. Where, anywhere no one else was running towards. Ignore the packs and the weapons, the lure of gifts not worth the price they demanded. Blood, one way or another. Be quick, because in the arena, living and dying came down to a matter of timing.

The timing was quick, before she could scream. The pain would have lasted a fraction of a second, or so he told himself as he struggled to keep his breakfast down. Passed in a blink, like thirteen years did. Not a half-life, not even a quarter of one. It was so quick.

Just as quickly, he ran to the elevator. Jabbed the button for the fourth floor. It did nothing. He jammed it again and again until the tiny circle of glass splintered beneath his thumb, but the elevator refused to give in, motionless, cold.

Eventually he rode it down to the ground floor. The car smelled of bile from where he vomited in the corner, breakfast and the little of his dinner he ate the night before. He stayed in the lobby, leaning against the elevator doors to prevent them from closing, until a poor Avox came across him. He begged her to help him up to the fourth floor. With some reticence, she activated the floor.

As he staggered out of the elevator, Jannik saw Carlos and Juanki watching the Games with identical expressions of disgust. “I’m—” He aborted the apology, his stomach lurching.

In a flash faster than a bolt of lightning, Carlos was standing in front of him. Behind him, out of focus, Juanki shut off the television and vanished from the room, the last thing Jannik saw before he collapsed into Carlos’s chest.

Again, he tried to apologize, but only a hacked cough came out. His lungs were collapsing. Unraveling, Jannik pressed his face into the curve of Carlos’s neck, and sobbed.

Her name had been Ellie, and she was dead, and when Jannik tried to remember anything else he knew about her, his mind blanked. Instead of asking her favorite color or what her family was like, he had talked at her, not to her. Because he had wanted to save her life, so his time here might have been worth it, so he would not have had to feel this crushing weight of failure. Another kid he had a hand in killing.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Carlos whispered, hushed like a lullaby. He too sounded close to tears. “It’s okay.” One hand swept down Jannik’s back, the other combed through his hair. Jannik squirmed, a weak attempt at pushing away the comfort he sought but didn’t deserve. Carlos held fast. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

“It’s—it’s my—”

“It is not your fault.”

His fingers twisted in Carlos’s shirt, a tear. “I can’t—I—”

“You’ll be okay.” The whispered promise seemed to wrap gently around Jannik, just as Carlos’s arms did. “I have you.”

Time fractured. In one moment, he was standing, sobbing, in Carlos’s arms, and in the next he was horizontal, blinking into a fuzzy half-dark. The bedding beneath his cheek was soft and blue, always blue, imitation ocean. He had his knees tucked to his chest, curled in a ball, his forehead resting against Carlos’s hip.

In Carlos’s room, laying in Carlos’s bed, and Carlos was sitting against the headboard, his fingers absently carding through Jannik’s hair while he watched the television on low. Something was happening, because his hand stopped moving and he began to swear in a language Jannik did not understand. Jannik had never seen him angry before, not up close. It was a little like staring into a fire growing rapidly out of control, and not knowing whether to put it out or let it burn everything down.

“What’s happening?” Jannik lifted his head a little, scrubbing a hand down his face in a half-hearted attempt to clear the hazy film from his eyes. He saw a flash of blood and, like a coward, dropped his head back down to the bed.

“It is not fair,” Carlos spit out. The anger radiating off of him spiked the temperature in the room, a fiery heat Jannik experienced like fever scorching through his body. He was right—it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t, and neither was how helpless they were to do anything about it.

Carlos used a remote to mute the television. His fingers tightened around the plastic like he was considering throwing the remote across the room, but then his grip relaxed. Jannik thought about reaching up and bringing the hand Carlos had tangled in his hair to his chest, but even lifting his head had been like trying to surface from deep underwater. He didn’t think he could reach Carlos without falling further under. 

For a time Jannik pinpointed between a few minutes or a few eternities, the only sound in the room was Carlos’s labored breathing. Then, the covers rustled. Carlos slid down the headboard and turned onto his side, mirroring Jannik.

So close, despite the dark, Jannik could see the deep crease between his brow, his unshaven stubble, the pockmarks on his cheeks the stubble couldn’t hide, and the fury in his eyes. Fury, and fear.

“I wanted to win,” Carlos said, in the hushed tone of a confession. “I wanted to win so bad. Always, I am competitive. Mama, she says it is one of the best things about me, but also…” He sucked in a breath. “I want to be good and I want to win, but I do not think I…”

Carlos pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. Allowing instinct to guide him, Jannik inched across the small divide and wrapped a hand around Carlos’s forearm. He heard a hitch in Carlos’s breathing. His hands dropped from his face, and Jannik saw the fear had completely unseated his fury. It was him Carlos was afraid of, Jannik realized. Jannik’s rejection terrified him.

“You are good,” Jannik whispered.

Carlos shook his head, and the muscles in his arm tensed beneath Jannik’s fingers.

“You are good,” he repeated, his voice fading. The cool glow of the television cast slippery shadows across the bed, lulling him. “I didn’t used to sleep like this,” he murmured, sleep-slurred. He used to sprawl. Someday he’d have to ask Carlos if he would have put up with that.

Sinking deeper into sleep, he almost missed Carlos saying, “I used to swim.”

Everything they had lost in the arena, the pieces cleaved clean off and those that withered away, would have been enough to puzzle back together two whole people. That Jannik and that Carlos would have loved each other. They might have stood a chance.

Dear Jannik,

Packing for the victory party is strange. Do you think so? They give us clothes when we get there, so we are really just bringing what we wear on the way back home. They have the track suits in the bedroom cars, too, the ones with our district numbers, so maybe we don’t need clothes to wear home. Do you notice Daniil almost only wears this suit in the Capitol? Maybe I will do this next time!

I wish I can pack oranges, but they are out of season. I will try to pack a good shell if I find one. A lot of the best ones are collected by young kids here and sold to Peacekeepers. I think they end up going to One and Eight. I can ask Grigor and Stefanos at the party.

Now I think about it, this might not make it to you before you leave. I guess it will be waiting for you when you get back if not. To the Jannik reading this after we saw each other, I hope we had fun!

To the Jannik reading this before, see you tomorrow.

Yours,
Charlie

On the station platform, they hugged for a long time, long enough for Jannik to take full stock of how differently they were built, one of sticks and one of stone, a study in opposites. Strangely, they fit together anyway. Carlos’s thick hair tickled against his cheek, smelling faintly of oranges.

“I’ll write,” Jannik promised, because Carlos deserved something concrete.

Carlos pulled back to beam at him. “Not if I write first, eh?”

Jannik swallowed thickly. “Right.”

From the door of the train car, the District Four escort cleared her throat. Trains to and from the Capitol didn’t keep a tight schedule, but they had to leave eventually. After a final goodbye, Carlos went to board. Every few feet, he glanced back, smiling when he saw Jannik still standing right where he left him.

A hand fell on Jannik’s shoulder, jarring him. Juan Carlos chuckled under his breath at how he jumped but without malice. Really, he had been nothing but unfailingly kind to Jannik after he had all but moved onto the fourth floor for the full two and half weeks of the Games.

(Every night, Jannik insisted he’d stay on the couch in the screening room, and every night, one of two things happened. Either Carlos snuck into the screening room sometime past midnight and slept on the opposite end of the couch, his outstretched legs brushing against Jannik’s shins, or Jannik crawled into Carlos’s bed and curled into the space he left open for him. Both of them feigned sleep when the other came in; both of them were bad pretenders. It was evident in the way Carlos breathed, the rhythms Jannik had learned by heart.)

“Thank you, again,” Jannik said, and hoped Juan Carlos knew how much he meant it. He had been accumulating a lot of emotional debt he didn’t know how he’d scrounge up the strength to repay.

“You’re welcome, not that you need to thank me,” Juan Carlos said, shaking his head. “Or anyone.”

He moved to board the train, at a slower pace than Carlos owing to a tricky knee. It had been a little over twenty years since Juan Carlos had won his Games, but those years had taken a clear toll. What he had to show for them were the silver streaks in his hair, the weathered lines etched into his face, the ruined knee, the scars, but he had something else, too, didn’t he?

“Wait!” Jannik called after him. Juan Carlos stopped, looking back. The escort, with an impatient frown, checked a rhinestoned pocket watch. “Can I ask…”

Jannik eyed the escort with some trepidation. Reading the look, Juan Carlos waved her inside the train with the promise he’d board in a minute, track the time if she must. With only the two of them on the platform, Carlos watching curiously from a window but unable to hear anything, Jannik asked, “Saving him, did it make any of it better?”

He expected he knew the answer already. The regretful look Juan Carlos gave him, with its undercurrent of grief, told him enough. “I am proud I could, and I am proud of him, for how he fought.” Juan Carlos spotted Carlos at the window where his breath had fogged the glass, terrible at hiding his spying, and smiled. Quietly, he added, “How he still fights.”

“But?” Jannik pressed.

After a lengthy pause, Juan Carlos answered, “You will want it to make up for everything else.” His eyes bore into his like if he looked long and hard enough, Jannik wouldn't have the option not to internalize his wisdom. “It won’t.”

Jannik stayed on the platform to watch the train pulling out from the station. Carlos had rushed from the center car to the observation deck, waving from behind the glass. Jannik waved back, feeling his parting gaze like a hand on his cheek, like warm fingers carding through his hair. Cooling, the further away the train got.

His teeth were chattering and the train was long gone by the time he left. He shoved his hands in his pockets and strode two tracks to the left, where his train waited. Instead of chiding him for holding up their departure, Simone patted his back in solace. “Well," he said, "you are the only passenger.”

Charlie,

Can you describe a lighthouse for me? I don’t remember seeing one during the tour. Have you ever been inside one? Are they very useful anymore?

That is something asked in Six a lot. Is it useful? You would be surprised how much the answer is no.

– Jannik.

Back in Six, the days stretched like the old highways at the borders of the district, roads going nowhere.

He wandered around his big house, ate food he never tasted, felt exhausted but barely slept. Visited Veronica and the baby, let little Matteo grasp his pinkie finger in his tiny fist and tried not to cry when he cried. Had a few lunches with Darren, more awkward than they should have been. Invited Sonego and Arnaldi over, played hands of Texas Hold ‘Em until Arnaldi lost his shirt and shoes, debated what Texas must have been like, sent Sonego and Arnaldi home with bags of leftover food and clothes he had never worn from closets stuffed full of them. The food they might have kept, but the clothes he found at the bottom of trash bins outside the many vacant houses in Victors Village, because Capitol money poisoned any act of charity. He hated being in the position to call it charity, missed the days the best gifts they gave each other were walleyes and perch they fished illegally from the lake.

At the lake, he sat for hours alone, just breathing. His frosty exhales were a strange sort of comfort. In the arena, those little clouds of ice had been proof he was alive.

Mostly, Jannik wrote to Carlos. At the lake’s edge or on a freight car in the train cemetery, he wrote pages and pages of letters he’d never send. Some because they devolved into raging tirades against the Capitol, others because his infatuation bled through the lines. No matter how much Jannik had to excise, he always felt marginally better afterwards having written everything down. Enough that he stopped cutting out the beating heart of all his letters, what he might as well say in the plainest terms.

He missed Carlos. He missed him like a train would miss its passengers, the deep loss of direction and purpose chiseling away slowly but methodically at his heart. He missed him as fiercely as he dreaded returning to the Capitol, and the torture that those two things could not be disentangled, Carlos and the Games, had begun chasing him as far as his dreams.

On good nights, he dreamed of Carlos with him in Six. They explored old train cars, swam in the lake, and, when they were tired, lay in the weeds. On the bad nights, he dreamed of the arena, the frozen wasteland, his fire flickering out and the girl from Four screaming. The worst nights, he was trembling on the glass surface of the lake, squinting into the squall of snow, and there, with a rock clutched in his fist, was Carlos, superimposed on Jannik’s worst memory. He woke up thrashing, his eyelashes wet and his clothes soaked through. Begging him to stop, please.

I think I would give you up if it meant I never had to be in the arena, Jannik wrote in another letter he’d cut and trim to palatable pieces.

Never compete, never win, never meet Carlos, never volunteer in the first place. Abandon Musetti to die and never meet his son. Or volunteer, compete, allow the rock to slam against his temple and die instead, blissful and guiltless afterlife. Assuming the afterlife existed, and was not just a yearning fantasy invented to justify noble and sacrificial suffering.

Jannik dropped the pen, folded his arms, and buried his head in them.

The next thing he knew, his mom was shaking his shoulder. The room was dark. There was a patch of the drool in the center of his unfinished letter. For the ink on his cheek, his mom used some spit and her thumb to scrub it away. He had been dreaming of the frozen lake, sitting down in its center and waiting for someone else to decide his fate, and seeing a distant figure emerging from the wan horizon. Carlos, bringing with him the rising sun.

Dear Jannik,

Have you made a kite before? My brother and I made one yesterday. We did not make one in forever, since we were young kids. (My brother is still a young kid to me. Do you notice kids look younger now? I thought I was so old when I was thirteen, like my brother, but every kid younger than me seems like a baby now, you know? Even old kids, like eighteen, nineteen. I look in the mirror and see a young face but I don’t feel it always.)

Sorry, back to the kite! The reason we did not make more as kids is because it is hard to find paper. Especially paper not covered in fish slime! But we have plenty of paper now so after a lot of asking, my brother agree to help me. He really wanted to, I can tell. He just protests so if his friends see, he can say I force him.

The key to the best kite is not how it looks but the wind (maybe you have done this before and this is obvious!) and the beach is the best place to fly. We color ours orange and go at sunset, so it kind of looks like the kite is part of the sky. Even better than fireworks for me! It is more calm. And because you make it and hold the string, it is like part of you is flying.

Everything else in Four is good. I hope your winter in Six is not too bad! I cross my fingers for no snow.

Yours,
Charlie

John McEnroe, sleeves bunched at the elbow and sweat beading at his temples from all the vigorous cocktail shaking, winked at Jannik as he slid him something clear served in a crystal glass. Before Jannik could decline, John rolled his eyes and said gruffly, “Relax, kid. It’s water.”

The party had reached full swing an hour ago, but John had hopped one of the bars and taken charge well before that, declaring that particular bar for victors only. Nobody of authority had come over to reprimand him, whether out of deference or to save themselves the exasperation. John McEnroe was not a person to pick a fight with on a whim.

So Jannik took his unordered water without complaint, along with the scotch Darren had asked for, and wove through the throngs of tipsy Capitolites to drop off the drink. Several people clocked him, a few reached out to skim their fingers through his hair as if he were a stray dog trotting by, but Jannik had been right about one thing last year—everyone cared more about the newly-minted victor.

Holger seemed to be—well, enjoying himself might be harsh. Just because he hadn’t leapt behind any topiary didn’t mean he liked being the Capitol pet. But Holger had a sweeter smile than Jannik, an easier laugh and quicker quips, eliciting delighted shrieks out of the favored guests and extracting himself without too many claw marks. His stylist had even dressed him like a cowboy. Jannik looked like a car crash in comparison.

“Having fun?” Darren asked when Jannik delivered his scotch, one eyebrow knowingly raised. He clinked his glass against Jannik’s but didn’t drink.

“Trying,” Jannik answered in sarcasm, swirling his water.

Darren chuckled, but in a flash, he had plucked the water from Jannik’s hand and replaced it with the scotch. “Try harder.” He signaled with two fingers for someone out of Jannik’s sightline. “With your friends.”

“Oh, come, my friend.” Ons, materializing at his side, slipped her arm through the crook in his elbow and began tugging him away from Darren. It happened so fast Jannik didn’t have the chance to steal his water back. Left with the scotch, he trailed after Ons, half-listening as she said, “Jess has cards and Carlos says you are great at games.”

“Great is, uh…”

Jannik never finished his protest, lost in the cacophony of Jessica Pegula attempting to teach an old drinking game from Five to a group of buzzed victors. By the end of the warm-up game, Roger had won handily and Jannik had finished Darren’s scotch, a lemon-yellow cocktail Aryna ordered for him, and a double shot taken alongside Juan del Potro.

Whenever refreshments ran low, Grigor charmed the closest Capitol guests into refilling their plates for them, so no one had to withstand the packs of victor hunters—another Maria coinage, for the Capitolites desperate for a picture, an autograph, a saliva sample, or all three—who lay in wait for their trophies around the buffet tables. In between hands, Djokovic and Murray shared a few stories of their childhood exploits in Two, Murray’s dry interjections balancing Djokovic’s dramatic retellings. The well-worn routine made Jannik think of Arnaldi and Sonego. He wished they were there, and then again he didn’t.

Around the time Jess had started dealing people in for a third round, Jannik needed a break. He itched for someplace quieter. Carlos was in deep conversation with Naomi, but Jannik decided to take a chance and moved to stand beside Carlos, who immediately asked his opinion on the mint ice cream being served at the dessert buffet. Carlos couldn’t stand it, Naomi sought to defend its honor, and Jannik tried to stay neutral since he hadn’t tried the ice cream, but it was difficult not to get swept up in Carlos’s passionate offense.

It reminded Jannik of what Juan Carlos had said about Carlos, of how hard he fought in the arena and how still fought. He fought for everything, it seemed, whether it was being right about the best flavor of ice cream or just to keep a smile on his face. It must be exhilarating to feel everything that deeply, exhilarating but exhausting.

During a natural lull, Jannik asked, “I was wondering if you wanted to, uh, maybe…” He motioned toward the garden path. Naomi’s eyebrows rose minutely, so he added a hasty, “Both of you.”

“I’m good, but thank you for asking,” Naomi said with the warm, crescent-moon smile Jannik had come to associate with her, and pat his shoulder. “I’m going to have Grigor get me more snacks. Have fun though.”

They parted ways in opposite directions, Naomi towards the tables and Carlos and Jannik forging down the path, the way through the garden’s outer labyrinth illuminated by silvery lanterns mimicking starlight. Jannik had a destination in mind and his feet recalled the correct course, guiding them through the serpentined maze of hedgerows. Occasionally he glanced at Carlos and always discovered him already looking back, an instinct guided as if by a magnetic pull.

After the third glance, Carlos said, “I will sound mean, but…”

While Jannik doubted Carlos had the capacity for real meanness, he prompted, “But?”

“I did not want Naomi to come.”

Jannik tripped on an upturned stone along the pathway. His ankle twinged. After righting himself, he mustered a weak, “Me too. I mean, honestly…” He cleared his throat. If Carlos had chosen that moment to touch any part of Jannik, he’d find his skin scalding. “I asked to not be rude, but I wanted to be alone.”

“We are not alone.”

Their arms brushed, the maze’s narrow corridors drawing them closer together. The air around them was filled with the humming of fireflies, flying in perfect circuits above the hedgerows. Their glow danced across Carlos’s cheeks, freckles of light.

“It’s different,” Jannik said in a low voice, and before he could think better of it, “with you.”

Carlos nodded as if Jannik had confirmed something he already knew to be true, and wasn’t that just like Carlos to be one step ahead of him in everything. Jannik might have been the one leading them through the maze, but Carlos kept outpacing him, in brilliant bursts of speed correlated to how wide he was beaming. Always though, he slowed down again and returned to Jannik’s side. Jannik never had to worry about catching up.

Snaking the last bend of the hedgerows, they exited the maze. The noise from the party was a faraway murmur, but Jannik heard faint rustling up ahead, footsteps treading on the grass. He spared Carlos a brief glance as they inched forward, closing in on the tree where last year Jannik had stumbled on Daniil and Stefanos in the midst of a bitter argument.

History did have a tendency to repeat itself, but Jannik hadn’t expected it to take a hairpin turn.

Under the yellowing aspen, Stefanos had Daniil pressed against the trunk, a leg slotted between his and licking hotly into his mouth. Daniil had a handful of Stefanos’s curls threaded through his fingers, tugging him closer. Eyes shut, mouths sealed together and not letting up for air, they kissed like two fighters locked in the heat of a battle neither could afford to lose. Intertwined so closely, they almost resembled one person.

Jannik stared, mouth hanging open. Never had he seen a conversation between Stefanos and Daniil end without one leaving the other in a worse mood than he had found him. None of it added up, and the longer he gaped, the less sense it made. The dismissive way Daniil waved off Stefanos with the same hand he had splayed on his chest, over where his heart beat. The infuriated scowl Stefanos had given Daniil before he walked away from him last year, with the same lips spreading into a smile against his cheek. How did they reconcile it within themselves?

Just as the question brought him to the brink of madness, mad enough to call out and demand answers, Jannik felt an insistent tugging at his sleeve: Carlos, trying to haul him away before they were seen.

They raced the rest of the way down the path, Carlos’s hand cuffed around his wrist. The greenhouse was where they left it last year, just as private and as humid. They tumbled inside, Jannik slamming the door shut behind them and barricading his body against it. Panting into the thick air, he and Carlos exchanged one long bewildered look before combusting into hysterical laughter.

“How—”

“But they…”

“Do you think…”

None of their questions were finished or answered. They collapsed on the greenhouse floor, long legs spilling everywhere, and laughed until their ribs howled. One of Jannik’s never healed right, a bone with a perpetual bruise guarding the part of him in need of the most protecting. He was a mess, but being with Carlos had a way of making the mess seem salvageable. All the alcohol he had drunk finally slammed into him. Staring awed at Carlos’s laughing face, outshining the starlight streaming into their glass house, Jannik just wanted to tell him everything.

“But they hate each other,” he sighed once they had settled down. Lying on his back, head pillowed beside one of Carlos’s outstretched legs, he tried to make out a few constellations through the foggy ceiling.

“Or they love each other,” Carlos suggested. He toyed with a vine of blue ivy crawling out of its terracotta pot, striving for freedom. The plants had come a long way in a year. “They show it fighting.”

Jannik shook his head, specks of dirt creeping their way into his hair. “I could not be like that.”

Spoken as if he knew anything about love. Jannik’s idea of love hadn’t been informed by any real experience, just what he had seen in Six. His parents, patient with one another, cleaning dishes in perfect synchronization side by side, worrying about the future together but not who they would continue to share that future with. Matteo, with his girlfriends of the week, chased from alleys by a Peacekeeper with his belt undone, showing up everywhere with kiss-swollen lips, his affection freely given but fleeting. Then Musetti, bellowing his love for Veronica to the sky, walking five miles outside of town looking for dandelions to give to her as a weedy bouquet, his love big and brash, not to be rivaled. If love had a spectrum, Jannik was late to figuring out where his would fall. What if he was too late?

“Have you ever been in love?” he asked, cutting through the quiet.

“I don’t know,” Carlos answered after a while. His fingers traced swirling patterns on the stone ground close to Jannik’s head, where the ivy ended. “I…I think so.”

His heart squeezed painfully in his chest. Jannik almost asked who, but a name wasn’t going to mean anything to him when he’d never meet this girl, a sweetheart back in District Four who probably had known the Alcaraz family forever and had never done anything to hurt anyone. She would have gotten bouquets of wildflowers, stolen kisses, and the promise of a future with him. Jannik imagined Carlos’s love as having all the greatest parts of the loves he had known—dedicated, and exhilarating, and unreserved.

“What about you?” Carlos asked, drawing Jannik back out of his head. His mom and dad would have liked to know how he did that, often on the first try. “Have you ever been in love?”

For lack of anything better, Jannik stole Carlos’s answer. “I don’t know.” He fiddled with a glossy black button on his cuff, winking like an eye. I know your secret, it seemed to say. “I don’t know if it would be fair, to be honest, for me, for…”

“What do you mean?”

Jannik bit the inside of his cheek, his tongue twisting in a frustrated knot. Of all the times for Carlos to fail in reading his mind. Except that wasn’t fair. If he hardly understood the frenzied scribbles of his own thoughts, how was Carlos supposed to make sense of them?

“How can I ask someone to…to…” The button tore loose, now dangling by a thread, and Jannik sighed. “Choose this. To be a part of this life that I…that we have.”

“Maybe…” Carlos trailed off, his frown deepening and eyebrows drawing together, an expression Jannik knew meant whatever he had to say was too important to get wrong. “Maybe you find someone part of it.”

“Like Stefanos and Daniil?”

“Yes,” Carlos answered, his voice distant. Jannik tipped his head back for a better look at him. His expression was just as remote, unreadable. “Like Stefanos and Daniil.”

Clearly Jannik had gone wrong somewhere, came to a pivotal fork in the road of the conversation and, instead of choosing a way forward, turned around. Floundering, he opened his mouth to apologize, but an abrupt bang cut him off.

The greenhouse door shook in its frame, as did Holger Rune, breathing hard.

Eyes wide and wild, Holger took in the sight of them on the floor and burst out with an immediate, “Is everyone here fu—” He stopped, chest heaving. After a few bracing breaths, he stepped into the greenhouse, closed the door, and plastered his back to it. The frustration was melting quickly from his face, leaving behind pure exhaustion.

Jannik sat up, shuffling until he could lean upright against the glass. He would have felt less hot had he been lit on fire, a sizzling, embarrassed heat burning from the crown of his head down to the soles of his feet. He was probably shimmering with it. Risking a peek at Carlos, he swore his face looked flushed, but he was regarding Holger with a soft, empathetic expression. Same as he had given Jannik last year.

“I hate this place,” Holger muttered, flinging his rancher’s hat across the room. He sank down, folded his long legs into his chest, and propped his chin on his knees. Coiled inward, pouting but blinking slowly, he looked like a child losing the fight against sleep. He yawned, but said through it, “When will it be over?”

“Long time,” Carlos said regretfully. “But we can leave after the fireworks.”

Holger frowned, obviously not the answer he wanted. “When are those?” This time, he looked at Jannik.

“Soon?” Jannik guessed, and tried not to take Holger’s scowl personally.

Over the next minute, passed in silence, Holger scoped the room further, Jannik and Carlos with it. Jannik fought against the feeling he was being judged, but Holger had a way of dissecting a person with his eyes, like he had to find a reason to dismiss them before they could dismiss him.

Finally, he asked, “Are all of you like this?” His gaze dragged purposefully from Jannik to Carlos as though following an invisible string.

“All of us?” Carlos repeated, overlapped by Jannik asking, “Like what?”

“Victors, you are all…” With a glint in his eye, suggesting an inside joke with himself, Holger finished, “Boring.”

Carlos began laughing like Holger had let him in on the joke, but Jannik bristled. “You are one, too, now, you know,” he pointed out.

Bolstered by Carlos’s laughter, Holger shrugged and shot Jannik a game smile. “But I will not be boring.”

“You will not be anything the Capitol does not want you to be,” Jannik countered. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Carlos turning to him in surprise, but he stubbornly pressed closer to where they all had a bruise, even if Holger might not know it yet. “It is up to them, how you seem.”

A stormy look rolled over Holger’s face. Watch out for his temper, Courier had warned with a wink to the audience at home. “They won’t control me,” he sneered.

“You say so,” Jannik said cooly, shaking his head, “does not make it true.”

Darren would have been proud to hear how much Jannik sounded like him, a realist to the last. Then again, maybe he would be disappointed, as Carlos seemed now, staring at him like he had been replaced by a stranger. The reflection in the mirror, the face broadcasted onscreen, the person that Jannik didn’t recognize either had made a reappearance. He saw the near-carbon copy, distorted and blurry but real, mirrored in the glass over Holger’s shoulder. Jannik hated him, with his cold eyes, that immovable stone facade, but couldn’t Carlos and Holger see this was what he meant? The Capitol wouldn’t let this version of Jannik Sinner go.

“Well, maybe,” Carlos began, carefully enunciated, his eyebrows again drawing together, “they control us out there, but not…” He circled his arms to encompass the room. “Not in here.”

He looked at Jannik with a silent, pleading question in his eyes. Do you believe me? Unable to break his gaze, Jannik nodded, hardly conscious he was doing it. The doubts would creep in later, whispering of how they could only steal an hour a year here and it would never be enough, but nothing seemed impossible when Carlos smiled at him, never tentative, always with his heart in it.

A disgruntled noise cracked the moment in half, Holger reasserting himself. “Did either of you bring something to drink at least?” he asked. After they both shook their heads, Holger thumped his head against the glass and groaned. “So boring.”

“Maybe I want to be boring,” Jannik said, snickering. The joke might be a little funny after all.

Carlos nodded vigorously. “Me too.”

“You are crazy,” Holger dismissed as he stubbornly folded his arms across his chest, refusing to look at either of them.

“Which is it?” Jannik prodded. “Boring or crazy?”

While Holger rolled his eyes, Jannik could tell he was fighting not to smile, but once Carlos started laughing again alongside Jannik, he didn’t stand a chance. Soon they were all as hysterical as Carlos and Jannik had been when they first stumbled into the greenhouse, wiping unbidden tears from their sore cheeks. It took them several minutes to notice the fireworks had begun.

In the small hours of the morning, the sun encroaching on the paling horizon, cars shuttled them back to a Capitol hotel. Last year, Jannik had asked why the Capitol needed hotels, but Darren, face drawn, said they could talk about it some other time. They hadn’t yet.

Out of an unspoken agreement, he and Carlos milled around the lobby long enough to have an elevator to themselves. The fourth floor for Carlos and the sixth for Jannik, because even at a hotel designed for Capitol citizens and not for them, they had to be reminded their existence could be reduced to a single number.

The doors opened to the fourth floor and Carlos stepped out, murmuring a good night.

“Wait!” Jannik blocked the doors from closing with his shoulder. “What I said to Holger, in the greenhouse…I didn’t…”

Carlos stood patiently, not interrupting as Jannik tried to stammer his way into an explanation. The light in the corridor was dim, softening the few edges Carlos had. Sometime between leaving the greenhouse and now, he had undone a third button on his shirt and his pants were rumpled from sitting on the ground so long. Jannik could have stared at him forever.

The elevator doors rammed against Jannik’s shoulder with a jolt, struggling to move him out of the way. The mechanical effort sounded nothing like a clock, but he heard ticking, time always working against him whenever he needed more of it.

“I don’t think I said things right,” Jannik admitted a little desperately.

Carlos nodded, his eyes holding steady with Jannik’s. “But I understand.”

Relieved, Jannik smiled weakly. “See, you…you always seem to know what I am thinking.”

“Sometimes, yes,” Carlos said after a beat. “Not all the time.”

They continued to stare at each other. The distance between them could have been crossed in a single stride, and yet seemed as boundless as the distance between the homes they’d be leaving for tomorrow.

“I should…” The next step Jannik took was backwards into the elevator.

“Alright,” Carlos said, his smile, like the hallway, dimly-lit. “You will sleep okay?”

“I think so,” Jannik answered, but conceded, “I hate how quiet it is.”

“Me too.”

Finally uninhibited, the elevator began to close. Carlos stayed where he was, watching Jannik as the doors slid shut. It occurred to Jannik only after he reached his floor that Carlos might have been waiting for him to ask if he could stay.

Charlie,

At school in Six, we learn all the usual stuff, but we mostly learn a lot about how engines work. Engines are made up of cylinders and each individual cylinder needs to be evenly spaced to keep the engine balanced. Ever since—I guess I just feel like some of my cylinders aren’t working the way they’re supposed to anymore. I’m being compressed, and compressed, and compressed, and the explosion that’s supposed to happen to power the engine isn’t happening.

I don’t know. I’m probably not making any sense, but you always trust me to get what you mean and I trust you, too.

– Jannik.

Their names were Alexandra and Salvatore, but Jannik should call him Sal because everyone else did. Why did his parents decide to name him Salvatore, Sal mused, if they were only going to use that name when he was in trouble, which wasn’t a lot. He swore to Jannik he wasn’t a bad kid, honest. There wasn’t a way for Jannik to say, it doesn’t matter, that sounded like a reassurance and not a death sentence.

Both were sixteen, middle of the pack. Alexandra had some height and Sal a sturdy build, but Jannik would have trouble finding them sponsors without above-average training scores or a winning interview. Two years in, and already Jannik was falling into every trap the Gamemakers laid. To have any hope of improving his tributes’ chances, he had to improve their Games.

But the alternative sickened him too much to consider. If he refused to care about these kids in a selfish bid to protect himself from further heartbreak, how could he pretend he was any better than the Capitol viewers who saw them as characters, beloved but expendable, at their most entertaining when they were killing or being killed.

Jannik persuaded them to eat, a minor victory, and talked them through the Tribute Parade step by step. “Just, uh…” He grimaced. “Smile.”

Alexandra narrowed her eyes. “You didn’t.”

Her bluntness punched a laugh out of him, and, as if given permission, Sal and Alexandra started laughing along. The oppressive heaviness hanging in the air since they left Six behind lightened, oxygen replaced with helium, their laughter high and ringing clear as bells. It felt—Jannik didn’t know if he’d go as far as good, but good enough he could daydream the train was heading somewhere else, maybe to the western coast.

But the train arrived in the Capitol on time down to the minute, mocking in its precision, and the exact same routine as the year before followed. His tributes were led off with their stylists, his single bag transported to the sixth floor, and Jannik dragged himself to the ballroom where the other victors waited.

The opening reception hosted a line-up of different but familiar faces. No Iga, but Billie Jean King came over to say hello and ask him how his year had been going. No Stefanos either, but Sampras always seemed happy to shake hands and trade jokes with anybody.

Mostly Jannik stuck close to Daniil, who had darted to his side the second he showed up and off-loaded a plate of food in his hands. (“I don’t want it anymore,” he insisted.) While picking through the plate, Jannik talked with Serena, one of the famous Williams sisters of District Two, for the first time and exchanged pleasantries with Justine Henin of One. In every conversation, he had to school himself not to let his gaze wander, searching for someone he’d not find.

Jannik thought he had been doing a fair job, until Roger Federer interrupted a tedious conversation they had been having about auto-work to ask lightly, “Waiting for someone?”

“No, it’s, ah…” In a panic, Jannik tore his eyes from where they had strayed to the door and found Roger smiling at him, amused. “No one.”

“And how has the letter writing been going?” 

Such a smooth change in subject, the shock of him knowing Jannik wrote letters hit belatedly. “It’s good, but how…”

“I’m surprised Carlos didn’t tell you. Four,” Roger sighed, overfond. “They share everything it seems. But I know because Rafa gave him the idea. We have been writing letters for many years.”

“Many,” Jannik repeated, sensing the understatement.

“Twenty now.”

Jannik couldn’t fathom it, to have done any of this for two decades. The Roger before him appeared at ease, standing tall in a crisp white suit, his dark hair streakless. From what little Jannik had seen of Rafael Nadal, he seemed equally as self-possessed, his hair slowly receding but not his spirit. Tempests might rage in the spaces between their temples, but nobody in the country would know it, save for what they told each other.

In the first letter Carlos had sent him, he shared something Rafa had said to him, an assurance he would never be alone. Jannik wondered now if Nadal recommended Carlos write to someone in that same conversation.

“Twenty years is, uh…a long time,” Jannik said eventually.

Roger nodded. “Some days, it really does feel like it.” He went to take a sip of champagne but paused with the glass hovering at his lips, his eyes hazy with memory. Then, after shaking himself out of the daze, he placed the glass down and said with a small laugh, “You can imagine my seashell collection.”

Jannik broke into a grin, the power both Carlos and Rafael had to make someone feel intoxicated without needing to drink, momentarily weightless and giddy, traveling across hundreds of miles. “Mine is not so big, but growing.”

In the midst of Jannik and Roger comparing collections, Borg and Casper entered the ballroom, the last arrivals. As hard as Jannik tried to remain focused on their conversation, Roger eventually shooed him off. “Send Borg over for me,” he called. “He owes me a drink.”

To Borg, Jannik relayed Roger’s message. Awkwardly, he stuck out his hand to shake with Casper, who ignored it in favor of pulling him into a hug. The move reminded him of Carlos, but, at that point, Jannik didn’t know what wouldn’t. He was everywhere, in the gleam of someone else’s smile, not as bright, in the high note of a different laugh, not as boisterous, in the faint smell of sea salt in Casper’s hair, home but not quite.

“I have something for you,” Casper whispered. As they stepped back, Casper pressed a letter into Jannik’s hand. Lighter than usual, the envelope unmarked, but Jannik knew exactly who it was from. Everywhere, he thought again, astonished. Everywhere Jannik needed him to be, except in reaching distance.

Jannik slipped the letter into his jacket, where for the rest of the night it worked at scorching a hole through the pocket. Only once he was back in the relative safety of the sixth floor did he tear into the letter. 

Dear Jannik,

I ask Casper to give this letter to you when he sees you because I realize that means we can trust no one will read it but you and me. And Casper says he will deliver any letters you write in the Capitol, if you have time!

I try asking Bjorn to let me go instead, but he says no and Juanki made Casper promise not to switch. Bjorn talked to me a little about when he was the only victor alive from Four. He says he felt a small part of his soul wear away each year he mentored alone. He did not have anyone to share responsibility. He had no one to talk to. No one told him it is not his fault.

You will always have me. Even when I’m not there. Nothing that happened in the Games last year is your fault. Nothing will happen this year is your fault. It’s not fair. We say that to each other, remember? It is true. I’m sorry I cannot tell you face to face. You are right—everything I want to say to you, I want to say when we are together.

Please write. Tell me everything, no matter how bad.

Yours,
Charlie

The first time through, he read it too quickly, desperate to reach the end and see Carlos’s faithful close. Yours, Charlie. It took another four readings to appreciate the simple genius of what Carlos was proposing. By writing letters while in the Capitol and sending them through Casper, Jannik wouldn’t have to worry about anyone from the Capitol reading his mail. He could write whatever he wanted.

Jannik wrote everything. He told him Alexandra’s and Sal’s favorite colors—orange for Alexandra and blue for Sal, but also sometimes orange, too, and yellow like a good runny egg. What subjects they had liked in school, their childhood memories of losing teeth and skinning knees, songs they loved to sing (which, Alexandra couldn’t really and Sal really, really could, and Jannik also told Carlos how hard it was not to cry.)

At the betting concourse, he sheltered in the spot Carlos had found for them under the red-leaved willow tree and wrote more. Risked talking about the things he despised like the betting odds and the peacock hats. He sat next to Casper, who never peeked over his shoulder, but sometimes Daniil tried to read upside down.

“So much effort, I guess I don’t see the point,” Daniil said after Jannik started using his forearm to block the paper from view.

“I think it’s cute,” Maria declared. If she had been looking at Jannik, she would have seen his awful blush, but she seemed more interested in ribbing Daniil. “Are you sure there is nothing you want me to bring back to Eight when this is over?”

A shadow fell over Daniil’s face. “There is nothing I have to say to Stefanos I would want written down.”

Daniil abandoned them not long after. Maria must have caught the concern on Jannik's face because she waved it off by saying, “Ignore him. He is always moody the years that Stefanos is not here.”

With a little shame, Jannik shared that tidbit with Carlos. Most things concerning the victors ended up in his letters one way or another, whether it was Ons asking him to tell Carlos she missed him or a dedicated paragraph to the antics of Holger Rune.

Holger divided his time between nipping at the heels of his fellow District Ten mentor, Caroline, and pretending he didn’t need her, saddling up to the likes of veterans Sabatini and Connors instead. Whenever that inevitably backfired, often to the tune of Connors blowing up in his face, he slunk his way over to Jannik, mainly to complain.

“I don’t see what is the big deal,” Holger protested, waving a spoon around like a weapon he didn’t know how to control. “I just said my tribute has a better chance since he is older. It is the truth!”

“Just don’t compare tributes,” Casper said evenly, but he was massaging his temples, a side effect of being in Holger’s presence. Where Daniil treated Holger with the detached amusement of a much older brother, Casper hated having him hanging around.

Jannik wound up splitting the middle, not exactly amused by Holger but interested and sympathetic enough not to hate him. Half the time, he wasn’t sure even Holger knew if he wanted Jannik to treat him like a friend or a rival. One moment, he would seem content to sit in companionable silence together, but in the next, he’d try to snatch Jannik’s letter away because he was restless, bored, and hoping to get a rise out of someone.

“Are you ever going to tell him you’re in love with him?”

The word Jannik had been writing broke off in a rough dash. He glared at Holger, who stared back with a frown, confused why Jannik was annoyed. They were early to the concourse, so the rest of their usual group hadn’t shown up yet, but Holger would have asked in front of a full audience. Jannik hated that brazenness, except for when he envied it.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jannik said, the coolness in his tone at odds with the flaring heat at the back of his neck.

Not cool enough to persuade Holger to drop it. “Uh-huh, I write such long letters to all of my friends.”

Instead of answering to his sarcasm, Jannik exhaled through his nose and resumed writing.

“I write to Carlos, too, you know.”

His head shot up before he could stop it, so Jannik had to watch Holger lean back smugly, the simple trap he had laid working as designed.

“I do write to him,” Holger reiterated, “and that's how I know it is different, you and him.”

Jannik could have called him a liar, but something in how plainly he had said it, without a trace of ridicule or goading, convinced him Holger was telling the truth. About writing to Carlos, which stung Jannik in a childish way not unlike if Holger had wrestled a special toy from his hands, but also about how their reasons for writing were not the same. On Jannik’s and Holger’s side, but also on Carlos’s.

“So, are you going to tell him?”

Before Jannik could answer with a transparent lie—no, of course not; you still don’t know what you’re talking about; just because it’s different, doesn’t mean it’s like that—Casper sat down and Holger turned his attention to pestering him. Leaving Jannik to redeem a letter riddled with ink stains, incomplete thoughts, and the specter of what Holger had implied hanging over every word.

But soon enough, the Games began, and Jannik didn’t have time to pick apart what Holger meant or write much more than a few fragmented sentences for Carlos. Unlike last year, both of his tributes escaped the bloodbath with their lives. Any time not wasted on sleep, he spent at the betting concourse trying to woo late sponsors. He collected thin stacks of money, felt sick about it, told himself to get it together, sent whatever the money could afford in packs to the allied Alexandra and Sal, and repeated the cycle the next day.

His hope compounded the more days that passed. He fell asleep with the TV on, woke at the slightest sounds, and ate only when Simone gently reminded him he should. The heightened state of alert reminded him of his own time in the arena, but he was too far gone to course correct. Some nights, he hallucinated another person on the other side of the bed. Already he lost himself in daydreams of bringing Sal or Alexandra home.

Again, it crashed down quickly, his hopes dashed as if on the rocks of a cliff face. He had been asleep when it happened, and so had they, a pack ambush in the dead of night. “It would have been over before they knew what was happening,” Ons said in an attempt to comfort him. Her husband was a doctor, and he knew the best and worst ways to die. Jannik wondered if her husband also knew the best and worst ways to live.

He planned to wallow alone for however long the rest of the Games lasted. Over the first two days, Ons and Maria sent him persistent invitations that he ignored, but on the third, Daniil and Casper took a more direct approach, showing up unannounced and hauling him away from the island he had made of the sixth floor.

“For your own good,” Daniil said in the elevator, jamming the button for his floor.

Beside him, Casper nodded. He had been the one to force Jannik into a shower before they dragged him anywhere, and it was around that time Jannik realized more than one person must have asked them to look after him. Under the boiling water, he had been indignant. He wasn’t a child, and he could cope or not cope with the reality of his life however he saw fit. But stepping out of the shower, his skin tingling as if it were brand new, Jannik had been relieved just to hear people talking on the other side of the door.

So, they commiserated on the roof together. Daniil had a bottle of champagne chilling between his knees. Every so often, Casper accepted a small sip. He had brought up an apple, not to eat but to pitch off the roof, catching it each time the force field shot it back at him. Jannik did not accept the champagne offers. He needed a clear head while he scrambled to finish a final batch of letters to Carlos.

Sip, throw, scribble, occasionally punctuated by the crackle of a few scattered fireworks. Sip, throw, scribble. Sip, throw, scribble, crack. Always, they braced like a gun had been leveled between their eyes. Sip, throw, scribble. Sip, throw, scribble, crack.

At the fifth explosion, Daniil stood abruptly, seized his bottle by the neck, and chucked it off the roof. Within seconds, the bottle rocketed back through the force field and missed smashing against Daniil’s face by millimeters. The bottle shattered on contact with the concrete roof, spraying glass everywhere. What remained of the champagne spread beneath the broken glass in a dark, mirrored pool.

His back to the wreckage, Daniil said, “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

“Daniil—”

“No, please.” Daniil extended his arm, a threat he’d push Casper back if he tried to touch him. “I cannot take your fake positivity right now. Don’t you ever get angry, Casper?”

Casper seemed to clench his jaw, but it could have been the way the sallow light moved across his face. His voice held firm when he answered, “Of course I do.”

Daniil looked past Casper to Jannik, in his fiery eyes a challenge. “Do you?”

“I—”

Before Jannik made it past a word, Daniil scoffed and turned away. He walked to the edge of the roof, sat, and swung his legs over the ledge. “I didn’t ask for this,” he said, speaking to a city that had never listened to what he was actually saying. “You two did.”

“That’s how it works in Four,” Casper said defensively. “Or how it is supposed to.”

Daniil threw back his head in a bitter laugh. “Ah yes, The Careers.”

“No, it’s not like…” Casper gave up with a sigh.

“What is it like?” Jannik asked, putting down his pen. They had stumbled onto a topic Carlos never talked about, in his letters or otherwise.

Casper sank to the ground; unlike Daniil, he sat with his back against the ledge, rolling the apple between his splayed legs. Not quite looking at Jannik, he explained, “It started a long time ago, with Rafa. His uncle thought it would be a good idea to train him. You know, in survival, weapons, just in case. I think he may have wanted him to…” He shook his head, like the suggestion was too horrifying to consider. “I guess that part doesn’t matter. But after Rafa won, his uncle decided to start training older kids. So if someone under sixteen was reaped, they could volunteer.”

Jannik frowned. “But Carlos…”

“By my Games, there weren’t many kids who wanted to train. No one from Four had won since Rafa. After I volunteered and won, Toni and Rafa thought maybe…” Casper shifted, uncomfortable. “The boy who was supposed to volunteer for Carlos got scared.”

In his mind, Jannik replayed the scene from Carlos’s Reaping. Instead of focusing on how he laughed through his tears, he tried to recall the moment before, Carlos panic-eyed and searching the crowd for something he expected to come but never did. Had Carlos felt betrayed, having been promised a savior only for the promise to be ripped away?

And if that boy had overcome his fears and volunteered, where would Carlos have ended up instead? Jannik imagined him on the deck of a fishing boat with his father and uncle, his last year with his name in the Reaping pool come and gone. He’d pick up side jobs harvesting oranges in the groves to alleviate any financial strain on his family. He would know Juanki and Casper, but only in passing. The most he’d think of Jannik was as another victor he’d struggle to remember in any significant detail, the one with orange hair who rarely smiled.

It hadn’t happened that way though. Jannik could spend a week of sleepless nights creating alternate universes where he and Carlos never met, ashamed of how grateful he was to a scared kid whose worst offense was not wanting to die, but none of it would reverse time. Carlos was reaped; Jannik volunteered. Carlos won his Games; Jannik won his. Carlos knew him. Jannik knew Carlos.

When Jannik laid it out without hundreds of meaningless caveats, he felt ridiculous for how long he had been waiting around, stuck at the make-believe station of his childhood expecting a real train to whisk him away to a perfect world, when he already had Carlos in this one. Improbably, and not under fair circumstances, or on their own terms most of the time, but he had him.

“Do you ever think…” But Jannik trailed off, not sure where he had been going with that.

Daniil, watching him and how he had begun idly tracing the lines of his abandoned letter, nodded. “All the time.” Then to Casper, he gave an uncharacteristically sheepish, “Sorry.”

“For what?” Casper asked, rhetorically and with a wane smile.

As exhausted as they were, they stayed on the roof until sunrise. For the next week, they spent every night there, sometimes talking, sometimes loafing in silence, often dozing off and waking each other up at the fringes of a nightmare. Eventually Ons joined them, then Maria, and later Holger, a quieter version of him. It disconcerted Casper so much that he ended up inventing a full game, rules and all, for throwing an apple into a force field. Force Field Ball was a great distraction; it was in the heat of the tournament finals between Team Holger and Casper versus Team Andy and Serena that Roger arrived with the news: Coco Gauff of District Five had won the 73rd Hunger Games.

The next morning, after he had finished packing and left the empty sixth floor as fast as possible, Jannik met Casper in the Training Center lobby and handed off a stack of letters as thick as a training manual.

Casper hid the stack in the inner pocket of his coat and said, “This will make Carlos’s year.”

“Does he ever, uh…” Jannik rubbed the back of his head. His hair had grown longer and more unruly over the long month and a half. “Complain about how short my letters are?”

“Complain? About you?” Casper stared at him, his eyebrows hiked high up his forehead. “Never.”

“Ah, well…” Jannik ducked his head, pressing his lips together to keep from grinning like a maniac. When he glanced up again, Casper was rolling his eyes, fond but unimpressed. “See you in six months?”

“See you in six months,” Casper echoed as they hugged, “though I won’t be the one counting the days.”

On the way home, Jannik sat in the observation deck and watched the country roll by, green and gold fields stretching in every direction. Once the train crossed the border into Three and  the fields flattened into tarmac, he began a new letter, this time with a promise it would be longer. In the corner, he marked the time until the next victory party.

Charlie,

I’m glad I know you, even when it’s hard. Especially when it is.

– Jannik.

“What would you do if you won?”

The ball smacked off Jannik’s racket and bounced with a metallic clap near Matteo’s feet. The hollow freight car beneath their feet echoed the sound in a beastly bellow. What Jannik thought had been a blistering shot came flying back at him with stunning ease. Not exactly a fair match-up to begin with since Matteo’s dad was the one who designed the rackets, so Matteo had much more practice with them. But he had wanted to teach Jannik an old game with a bunch of forgotten rules they could replace as they went along, and Jannik wasn’t about to say no to that.

“If I win this game?” Matteo asked just before he smashed Jannik’s high ball. Jannik scrambled to drop his racket and catch the ball before it went sailing off the roof. Laughing in the background, Matteo decided, “You will do my laundry for a week. No, two weeks.”

“Not this game.” Jannik picked up his racket again, sweeping the hair off his forehead. He’d have to fight off his mother’s scissors later; all month she had been threatening a haircut the night before the Reaping. “The Hunger Games.”

“Ah.” Matteo frowned slightly. His next shot had a loopy amount of spin on it, slowing the new rally down. “I would move into Victor’s Village with my family. And every girl in the district would want to marry me, of course.”

Jannik rolled his eyes. Every girl in the district already wanted to marry Matteo. Their love had never hinged on Matteo needing to do something spectacular to prove he was special. They wanted him for who he already was, or at least who they thought he would be.

“And you?” Matteo asked. Instead of hitting the shot back, he caught the ball with his racket, then spun it while keeping the ball cradled on the face. “What would you do if you won?”

Jannik shook his head reflexively. “I can’t win.” He thought that was obvious. A kid under the age of fourteen had never won the Games. Even winning at fourteen required a miracle.

“You’re right.” Matteo nodded as he began bouncing the ball on his racket face, a similar agreeing motion, but Jannik sensed a twist. Matteo looked past the ball, straight at Jannik. With a knowing smile, he declared, “You are too smart to get yourself into anything like that.”

You were wrong. The thought echoed through the long alleyways between the trains, beneath the reverberations of the ball bouncing, bouncing, bouncing, a moment briefly stretched past its natural end. I’m not smart at all.

Worn out, they sat with their legs dangling off the west side of the car and watched the setting sun dip into the lake, the sparkling surface of the water mesmerizing, crystalline. Instead of fading with each revisit, the memory sharpened. Inside it, Jannik could jump from twelve to twenty, but Matteo was frozen at seventeen. He would be seventeen forever, never wrinkled or grayed, not even given enough time to develop smile lines.

“You’re dead,” Jannik whispered to the horizon, blurring like he had opened his eyes underwater. He blinked, but the tears clung to his lower lashes, refusing to fall as they should.

Matteo nudged his shoulder, urging Jannik to look at him. “Yes, thank you for reminding me,” he said, a playful grin slowly stretching across his face.

“And I won.”

“No need to rub it in,” Matteo joked, again knocking their shoulders together. Jannik barely felt it, like a hand skimming smooth stone. The places where their bodies pressed together were cold. Nothing warmed him, not even the sun on his face, so he knew he must be dreaming.

“I don’t think I deserved to,” he admitted to this projection of Matteo, half a construction of memory and half a wishful figment of his imagination.

“And who did?” Matteo raised a lazy eyebrow. “Carlos?”

Jannik balked. “Of course he did. Everyone says—”

“Everyone?” Matteo interrupted, his voice thick with skepticism. “Who is this everyone who says you didn’t deserve it, but he did? He did everything you did, maybe worse.”

“No.” Jannik shook his head and would have kept shaking it until the sun had burnt out, the sky was full dark, and Matteo understood. “It’s not the—”

“Same.”

Matteo sounded disappointed, and suddenly Jannik was overcome by a blaze of anger so intense, he had to curl his fists to stop himself from shoving Matteo off the freight car. Fuck him for dying and leaving behind a hole in Jannik’s life he had never been able to fill. And fuck Darren, too, for coaching Jannik into becoming something he wasn’t. Fuck all this anger he had let build inside him, battering at the dam he had built to survive the arena and everything that came afterward. Sometimes, he thought fuck it. Find the weak spots, let it burst.

“What do you want from me?” Jannik asked, knowing he was asking it of himself. What did he want, other than to live in this memory for the rest of his life, where he was twelve and playing a silly game where no one got hurt. What did he want that he could actually have?

The answer was stupidly obvious.

“You love him?” Matteo asked, his mind’s way of forcing him to say it.

“I love him.”

To his surprise, those three simple words did not sound defeated. They just constituted a statement of fact. He was Jannik Sinner, born in District Six, victor of the 71st Hunger Games, and in love with Carlos Alcaraz.

“And you have decided to be miserable about it forever?” Matteo huffed and shook his head towards the lake, frustrated and baffled by Jannik’s sheer wrongheadedness. “You are hopeless without me, I hope you know this.”

“Maybe…” Jannik choked out, “Maybe you can tell me what to do, one more time.”

“You know exactly what I would tell you to do.” Matteo stood and stretched his arms over his head. The sky behind him had deepened to indigo. He fought off a yawn. In the real memory, he then pulled Jannik up and they walked together in the direction of home. In this dream version, he did not even offer Jannik a hand. “Will you listen to me this time?”

“It won’t change anything,” Jannik whispered.

“And so what?” Matteo countered. His voice was beginning to dissolve, as was he, curtained in the dying light of the day. Jannik squinted hard into the light, trying to hold on to the shadow of him for a few seconds longer. “I mean, you are wrong, but if you think it won’t change anything, how will it make anything worse?”

Something cold hit his cheek. Jannik blinked, the worst thing he could have done. Matteo was gone, the sky above him was a dismal gray, and another raindrop splashed against his cheek, already wet. As he sat up and stretched his sore back, he noticed someone in a cap pulled down to shade his eyes walking towards him, braced against the wind.

As clearly unhappy as he was to be outside in the freezing rain, Darren did not complain while climbing onto the freight car. He took a seat next to Jannik without saying anything, not even a sarcastic joke.

“Did my parents want you to find me?” Jannik eventually asked.

“No, I came looking for you all by myself.” Darren scoped the yard, smiling as someone did when a place or a person was exactly as they remembered. “I used to come out here a lot, too, you know. Back in my day, my friends and I would pretend we were bandits robbing the trains.”

Musetti had begged to play bandits on more than one occasion, but he never got his way because he was the youngest. The hierarchy of age dictated they follow Matteo’s lead and everyone, including and especially Musetti, idolized him too much to consider mutiny. Even after he was gone, they never played bandits. The trains had lost their essential magic without a conductor.

“We pretended we were at a train station,” Jannik said softly.

“Always a good kid then.”

He shrugged, his whole body stiff. “I guess.”

“You are a good kid.” Darren gazed out at the lake, mirroring Matteo in his dream. “You’re as good of a kid as I am as bad of a mentor.”

“What? How can you be bad?” Jannik asked, at a loss. “I’m right here. I’m alive.”

That nearly drew a smile from Darren. “You’re alive, but I stopped really trying to take care of you. I shouldn’t have let you mentor alone. We’re supposed to be partners now, and I let you down.”

“No, no,” Jannik protested vehemently, “I can do it. By myself, it is not too bad.”

Darren sent him a flat look.

“I can do it,” he insisted. “You need a break.”

“There is no break,” Darren sighed, world-weary, “whether I’m here or I’m in the Capitol. I know you want to help me, because you’ve got one of the biggest hearts of anyone I know, but sometimes you can be selfish, too. Ask for things. Take them if you have to.” He patted Jannik twice on the knee. “I say that only because I know you won’t be stupid about it.”

“Alright,” Jannik said, “Take another year off.”

Finally, Darren smiled. “Nice try.”

Jannik scrunched his face in annoyance, more put on than he actually felt. The rain had picked up steadily through their conversation, drumming against the roofs of the cars in a cold percussion. He tugged the hood of his sweatshirt over his head, using the long sleeves to mop some of the water off his face.

He expected Darren to say they should head back to the village, but instead he said, “There are things I’m going to start telling you about soon, too. Dangerous things. But you’re not actually a kid and I think you’re ready for them.”

A year ago, Jannik might have bristled to learn Darren had kept him in the dark because of his age, but today he only nodded. He was ready whenever Darren was.

“Don’t ever accept this is how it has to be forever,” Darren said fiercely, and reiterated, “Take things for yourself.”

“I will,” Jannik promised, and meant it.

Charlie,

I wanted you to win. From the very beginning, I wanted you to win. That probably doesn’t mean anything, but you should know.

– Jannik.

He tripped, tumbled, and thought through fall, this is it. The worn tread of his boots, the icy ground, the thinning air, and the suicidal mission he had sent himself on had caught up with him. As he fell, arms pinwheeling, Jannik heard a detached voice asking, why are you doing this?

His left forearm hit the ground first, bearing the brunt of his weight. His chin clipped a jutting rock. He cried out in pain, the first sound he had made in days. His throat, scraped raw, and his lips, blistered and bleeding, weren’t much use to him. He wiped his chin on his sleeve, so stiff the material might as well have been frozen, streaking it with blood.

Why are you doing this?

After a few deep breaths, Jannik rose to a crouch. He could see the cliff’s edge and, just beyond it, the misty line of dayglow preceding the dawn. Rather than risking another fall, he moved in a half-crawl across the remaining distance, his gloved hands scrabbling at the frostbitten grass. His lungs burned, the same as lips, his throat, his head. For days, he had been swallowing handfuls of the pills Darren had sent him, but the commentators would still blame the mania of fever for his current excursion.

He could picture his mother pacing a trench into the kitchen floor, asking herself why, why was he doing this. On the sixth floor of the Training Center, Darren must be sitting in the screening room, asking the picture of him on the television, what’s the plan here, kid?

Then again, the Gamemakers might have decided against showing his mad climb up their arena’s tallest peak. They only checked back in now that he had reached the top.

Jannik stood at the precipice, knowing he had the country’s attention. What is he doing? What is he planning? Who is this again? Who knew a kid from Six would make it this far? Do you think it’ll be much longer now? Why is he doing this? Why, why, why—

He closed his eyes. The voices stopped. He listened instead for the whistling wind whipping around him. From the valley below came the morning song of a lone mockingjay. Why did he do this? Later, when Jim Courier asked about this quintessential moment in his victor’s journey, he would lie and say he did it for a vantage point. On the screen towering behind the stage, the producers would splash the image of him waiting for the sun to rise and Jannik would remember what he had been thinking, what the audience would never get to know.

Why did I do this? Why did Ons sing, why did Stefanos murmur mantras to himself, why did Daniil rant at the injustices committed against him until the cameras had to cut away? Why did Aryna grunt in exertion, scream in pain, roll her eyes when exasperated, and show every ounce of her frustration? Why did Casper leave behind any weapons he found, why did Iga teach her allies how to rig an explosive, why did Grigor run towards a tribute screaming for help instead of away? Why did Naomi kiss the forehead of her district partner before killing him out of mercy? Why did Carlos cry for everyone he couldn’t save?

The sun was warm and new on his face when Jannik finally opened his eyes again. If he was going to die, he wanted to see this first, the frozen landscape from a bird’s-eye view: the thick forest of evergreens cloaked in snow, the glassy lake glittering beneath the sun, the plumes of smoke from the other tributes’ fires rising from the valley, the sky a watery blue like a sea at peace. For a brief moment, he wasn't scared.

He could have screamed, like Daniil or Aryna might have. He could have sang, like Ons, or said something poetic, like Stefanos. He had tears welling in his eyes, tears Carlos would have let fall freely.

Jannik used the back of his gloves to wipe the tear away and hiked his pack up his shoulders. He had proven to himself he could climb the mountain, but the people working overtime to master his fate wouldn’t let him stay there forever. He turned around.

His first step off the mountain, Jannik exhaled. In a big house by the ocean, another boy exhaled with him. He’d tell him about it, someday soon, on the night they met.

Charlie,

The first time we met, you called me brave. I’m not. Brave people do not wait two years to say all the things I want to say to you. 

Yours, always.

– Jannik.

Across the table, the bottom half of his face masked by a fan of cards, Carlos winked at Jannik just as he laid down his hand. He grinned like he couldn’t believe his luck either. Buzzing around his ears were the groans of the other players at the table and, beyond them, the sounds of a raging celebration thrown to honor the newly-crowned Coco Gauff, but Jannik barely registered any of it. He didn’t even know if his hand was good or worthless.

“Cheater,” Grigor was saying. He tossed down his cards, shaking his head as if aggrieved. “Did anyone else know we had a cheater in our midst?”

With a scowl, Daniil chucked his cards unceremoniously into the center of the table without turning them over to show his hand, then plucked Stefano’s cards out of his hands and did the same.

“Hey!” Stefanos squawked. He frowned. “Mine was not bad. Second best, I think.”

“There is no second place in poker.” Daniil slung his arm back where it had been before, resting on top of Stefanos’s chair. They were having a good night by their standards, bickering at a gentle simmer. “You are the winner or you lose.”

“And Carlos is, again, the winner,” Jess said, wasting little time gathering Stefanos and Daniil’s discarded cards. “We should get Roger back over here, so he can give you a run for your money.”

“Hold on.”

Jannik hadn’t noticed Ons leaning over his shoulder, distracted by Carlos and Grigor giggling into each other’s shoulders, but she seemed to have seen something in his cards he hadn’t because she announced with confidence, “Jannik won.”

“I did?” 

With all eyes at the table on him, Jannik laid down his cards. Immediately he saw what he had missed: a full house. He bested Carlos’s flush.

“Two cheaters,” Grigor declared, laced with leftover laughter. He waved his hand between Jannik and Carlos and clucked his tongue. “These two, huh. They are in it together. Trying to clean us out.”

They weren’t playing for anything more than the colorful petit cookies served by the towerful, but Jannik did feel guilty. He had been joining Carlos in all his outrageous bets hoping to bankrupt himself of cookies so he could leave the game. Everyone must have thought they both were bluffing on junk hands and were trying to call each other on it. Only Jannik knew Carlos never bluffed.

“I didn’t know, honestly,” Jannik protested, despite how little sense it made without context. But for full context, he would have to explain why he had been distracted by the wink, the smile, and the bulky outline of a bundle of letters plainly visible in Carlos’s pocket.

At the beginning of the night, Jannik had pulled Carlos aside as soon as he had found him in the sea of tipsy partygoers. Absconded behind a topiary in the president’s likeness, they had cringed together at their outfits—Jannik in a jet black suit with glittering tracks of sequins meant to resemble tire treads and Carlos in deep blue silk that rippled in the light. They had hugged, for as long as Carlos wanted Jannik had decided in advance, and then he had handed over the letters.

“This is all for me?” Carlos had asked, cradling the bundle like something to be handled with care.

“You don’t have to read them now. You really should not read them now, but…” Jannik had scratched his temple, his eyes darting from the ground to Carlos’s confused but attentive face and back down again. “They belong to you.”

The obvious wrinkle in his plan was Jannik would spend the entire night wondering when Carlos would read them. If he had to bet on it, he’d wager the mountain of cookies Ons was sweeping into his pile on Carlos reading the letters as soon as he got back to the hotel. What would happen after that, Jannik had no clue. His wildest imagination made it as far as a knock on his hotel room door before cutting to black.

The game lasted another two hands before Daniil quit by popping his last cookie into his mouth and dragging Stefanos away from the table. The rest of the group split up, but by the time Jannik had rounded the table, Carlos had been swallowed in the crowd.

Jannik wandered aimlessly for a while. He shared a scotch with Darren, got a hug from Novak, rescued Maria from a conversation with Connors, spent a half-hour eating snacks behind the treelike sunflowers with Naomi, and toasted with the Williams sisters. He saw Borg laughing with McEnroe, behind the bar again, and Iga helping Aryna unhook some of the metal tassels from her skirt. From across the terrace balcony, Jannik locked eyes with Roger, enjoying a glass of champagne with Rafael. Roger raised his eyebrows, as if to say, isn’t there someone you should be with, too?

By now, Jannik knew the way through the maze as well as the lines and calluses on his palms. He braced himself to see Daniil and Stefanos in another compromising position at the sycamore, but their spot had been taken. Casper and Holger seemed to be having a nice conversation for once, or at least one where Casper wasn’t holding back a grimace. Holger looked downright buoyant. Jannik left them to it.

As he neared the greenhouse, Jannik crossed his fingers he would find Carlos there and no one else. If Daniil and Stefanos had learned about its existence, he and Carlos would never be able to come back again. Honestly, Jannik would erase Holger’s memory of it if that were possible. After a deep breath, Jannik opened the door.

Inside, he found exactly who he wanted.

Surrounded by a wilderness of sunset-orange flowers blooming larger than their faces, Carlos sat pouring over one of the letters. By the look of it, it was the last, the rest blanketing the floor around him like a fresh snowfall. He was mouthing the words of the letter to himself, unaware Jannik was there. Good thing, too, because Jannik had frozen in the doorway, his heart in his throat.

Wasn’t this what he wanted all along? Jannik could have given Carlos the letters before they boarded their trains tomorrow, guaranteeing Jannik six months of space to panic over what he might have ruined forever. But he hadn’t. A part of him, the smart part that Matteo always insisted he had, knew he needed to force his own back against the wall. There weren’t any places left to run to or statues to hide behind, not when Carlos finally glanced up and saw him. His eyes widened, huge and gleaming in the dark. He looked breathless.

“These are…” Carlos shook his head and looked down again at the letter in his hand. He held it so tightly he was crumpling the paper. “They are not new?”

“Some are, but…” Jannik had raided every drawer in his room, the spot under his mattress, and the hiding place beneath a loose floorboard for the ones he had buried. He hadn’t changed anything about them, just sealed them in envelopes. “I never knew what might be…what was too much.”

“Nothing.”

Jannik nodded, closing his eyes as tightly as Carlos was holding the letter. He had known, always had somewhere deep down. Tears stung behind his eyelids. Two years wasn’t very long, not compared to the life they had ahead, but it still felt like such a waste. He had been hiding in the places he hadn’t wanted Carlos to see, in the terrifying corners of his mind where there was blood on the blade of his hatchet and under his fingernails, where over and over he was wrestling the rock from Malene’s hands, where he met with the ghosts of Ellie, Luca, Sal, and Alexandra, but he knew he couldn’t survive in those dark places anymore, not alone. The letters laid it out bare.

Paper rustled. When he opened his eyes, Jannik saw Carlos had stood. Under the pale light of the moon, his suit looked like the morning sky, a gorgeous contradiction.

“Why do you give them to me now?” Carlos asked.

“I…” Jannik wished now he had crash tested this confession. “I wrote them to you and you should, uh…you should get to read them.”

“You say you have things you want to tell me.” Carlos took a quiet step forward. The expression on his face was achingly hopeful. “What things?”

Jannik swallowed around his heart, still beating in his throat. He was dizzy with anxiety, but also something more. “It is one thing really.”

Another step, this one more purposeful. The letters fluttered in the humid air, birdlike, as though moments from taking flight. Carlos didn’t say anything, but his mouth twisted with the effort it must have been taking him not to burst into a smile. Jannik watched as he wet his lips.

“I love—”

The full weight of Carlos slammed into him, sending them both toppling out of the doorway and sprawling in the grass, Carlos landing on top of him. Jannik’s entire body groaned in pain, but the pain vanished the second Carlos grabbed his face between his hands and kissed him.

What Carlos lacked in skill, he made up for with sheer enthusiasm, pouring every ounce of happiness and love exploding out of him into the kiss. His fingers curled into Jannik’s hair, tugging lightly. Jannik tilted his chin up to meet him, so giddy that he smiled against Carlos’s lips. It was the third kiss of his life, but by far the best, better because of the chapped lips, the rough brush of stubble, the awkward angle, the scrape of teeth, and the sweet smell of oranges.

“Te amo,” Carlos whispered against his lips. He kissed him softly against the corner of his mouth, lingering there. “I love you.”

Jannik nudged his nose against Carlos’s. “Now you will let me finish?”

Carlos’s breathy laugh was warm against his cheek. “Yes, if you want.”

He wanted, so much. With care, Jannik brought his hand up to cup Carlos’s neck, his thumb skating along the soft line of his jaw. Before he could second-guess it, Jannik kissed him right where he could feel his pulse beating. “I love you.”

His mouth was still rounded around the last syllable when Carlos kissed him again.

Eventually, after a period of time Jannik counted in the hot slide of lips and fingers tangling in his hair, they stumbled back into the greenhouse and started gathering the letters. Started but discontinued within a minute, crashing together again, kissing heatedly against the glass wall.

Lost in the feeling of Carlos’s chest pressed against his, hands roaming the planes of his back, Jannik thought the sudden bang he heard was the first firework.

“I told you not to—”

“They weren’t doing this the last time!”

Jannik tore himself away from Carlos and reeled around, not as shocked as he should have been to see Holger wrinkling his nose in the doorway. Behind him was Iga, shielding her eyes like Jannik and Carlos were stripped of all their clothes and not just their jackets. Peering over Holger’s shoulder, Coco Gauff gave them an awkward wave.

“Uh, nice to meet you guys?” she said, playing off the awkwardness with a laugh. Jannik liked her instantly. “Holger just wanted to show us this cool greenhouse, but clearly you got here first…”

“They don’t own the greenhouse,” Holger argued, not budging an inch.

“We found it,” Jannik countered. He looked at Carlos, already looking back like always. “We keep it.”

Holger muttered something with a petulant frown. Jannik thought it might have been, “We’ll see,” but it was hard to hear him over the firework show beginning.

Coco tensed. All of them did, to lesser degrees, from Holger to Jannik, Jannik to Iga, Iga to Carlos. It would never go away, shrinking at loud sounds or whispering in the dark because you couldn’t know who might be around to hear you, but years of practice and they learned to bear it.

Outside, the sky was awash with light. They stood watching in an uneven line, their faces glowing in a spectrum of color. Everyone’s eyes burned brighter in the presence of fire, enlivened by the thrill of coming so close to something capable of devastating you but of saving you, too. It reminded Jannik of setting off contraband firecrackers with Arnalid, Sonego, and Musetti in the scrapyards back in Six, how scary and how freeing it had been to defy the Capitol’s tyranny even with what amounted to only toys. He had been so young. They were still so young, just kids.

Turning to Iga, Jannik asked, “Do you think this would make a good end to a story?”

After considering the fiery sky and the company they kept, Iga smiled and answered, “I think so, but also maybe a good beginning.”

“Or the middle,” Jannik suggested, and even though they laughed, he hadn’t been wholly joking. Most of life was just the middle.

Without his eyes leaving the sky, Carlos slipped his hand into his, threading their fingers together. He squeezed, a quick reminder he was there. Neither of them pulled away this time. Iga was right—it did make for a good beginning.

In a few hours, as the sun peeked over the horizon, Jannik would be wide awake in Carlos’s bed, watching him sleep. The clock on the nightstand would be blinking red, the time taunting him. Two hours until they had to board a train. Jannik would be thinking about what Darren had said about the dangerous things he had to tell him, and he would be thinking about war, and he would be thinking about how it was unfair that love wasn’t a battle he could win, but it was still something he’d always be at risk of losing.

Then Carlos would mumble Jannik’s name in his sleep, and Jannik would forget about the time and why he had been so worried about the sun rising. They’d survive it.

|||

Dear Charlie,

I'll see you soon.

Yours,
Jannik