Chapter Text
I suffered. It's difficult
to prove. Days of clouds, clouds
like swans, pitiless, mercurial.
- Leila Chatti
The mayor’s house was the grandest on District 12’s town square, a relic of the age when these mountains were ruled by barons. It had been altered in the intervening centuries, half-burnt and then rebuilt. Compared to the merchants’ houses, which had spalling brick, sagging awnings, peeling paint, and flat roofs missing shingles, the mayor’s house hardly showed its wear. It was set apart from the others by a circle of manicured grass and flowerbeds, all enclosed by a row of trees and a wrought iron fence with spearpoint finials.
From outside the gate, the chimney appeared on the verge of smoking; in truth, it was purely ornamental because modern mortar was thin and crumbled in high heat. At a distance, each story blended perfectly, but up close, the second floor was obviously patched: it was paler than the rest and already warping. The old growth maples had been decimated by logging, leaving only the new growth for repairs, and crown wood was quick to rot.
The original veranda was intact, however, as was the slate gable roof. The fluted columns had never cracked. These were the classical details that made the house worth preserving, according to architects from the Capitol, where statesmen lived in buildings modeled on the palaces of ancient emperors—or so the current mayor, William Undersee, told his Capitolite guests. They liked the idea that the rustics of 12 had aspirations of metropolitan grandeur, and most of all, that they were impossible to achieve. The backwoods district did not even have a hotel, which was the reason the mayor was required to host.
The house’s white facade used to have a sheen, like the silk dresses politicians bought for their wives and daughters, but it had lost its luster. The mayor blamed the dust drifting into town from the mine, complaining that there was no stopping coal from leaving its mark. His wife Merrilee attributed the change to the passage of time, sighing that ruin was inexorable, except somehow the front door was still gleaming Snow Red satin, President Coriolanus Snow’s favorite color, and the ormolu knocker was untarnished. Beside it was an electronic button bell, programmed to play a woodwind tune in order to distinguish it from the brass clanging above the merchants’ doors.
The mayor’s daughter Madge preferred the song–barely. Both sounds doubled her heartbeat, pumping terror through her veins. Her mother, less frightened, agreed they were a nuisance, especially when she had one of her migraines. The mayor often had to remind them that it could have been worse: the Capitol designer initially planned to announce visitors with cannon booms, synthesizers, and cymbals, the cacophonous bridge of Panem’s national anthem. It was only because he’d charmed the woman by recounting his tour of the city’s theaters with his bride—a celebration of his electoral victory two decades ago—that she chose a snippet of a dance score. He had an eye, he said with a wink, for a fellow romantic.
The song was about a swan hunt, he told Madge. It was unclear whether the birds were hunters or targets, but either way, she didn’t understand how they could possibly be romantic. Because swans were a rare sight in 12–and then always from below, traveling to lakes beyond the border fence–they were a mystery to her. When she asked her mother about them, she answered that their habits in the wild were irrelevant to the Capitol artists, who had no regard for nature, truth, or logic: the swans in their works were unnatural, and since Capitolites enjoyed retelling stories, changing them a little bit each time, there were an endless variety.
Their feathers were candy-pink, rose-red, or the iridescent black of engine oil. Their talons were dipped in cyanide, their beaks were iron blades, or their wings curled around a body with the strength of a python. They were carnivores like the hideous bald eagles that Madge’s nanny, Polly Hale, used to warn were evil omens. They were proof that beauty’s appetite was vicious and voracious too.
For years, Madge had dreamt of them, birds of every shape and every color. As the sun dipped behind the mountains, they mutated forms along with the light; it was always sunset when she was sleeping. Last night, they were gliding over glassine water, and their reflections were clearer and more terrible than their silhouettes against the violet and tangerine clouds. This morning, she woke up shivering.
Her mother was always encouraging her to compose her own music, building a score around those woodwind notes, in order to soothe herself when their guests put her on edge. Let their creatures have blood for supper, she said. Madge’s flock could live on double rainbows, lazy daisies, and elderberry syrup. Their feathers could be lavender or opal-pink or canary-yellow. For Madge’s birthday in the spring, she gave her a composition book with a swan embossed on its cover, gently ordering her to change the look and the sound of her nightmares. She spoke as if it would be easy, and perhaps, for her, it was: she’d been sleeping a lot, lately, and waking pliant and placid, hours passing before her nerves were shaky again.
That was why Madge was on the porch this morning, rocking in the wicker chair: she was trying to invent a melody. It was more difficult to do inside her head than at her piano, but she could not play until her mother recovered from her migraine.
Over the past year, the headaches had become crippling, striking nearly every day: she retreated to her bedroom to hide from the pain, and by the time she emerged again, Madge had forgotten what she’d meant to show her.
Out here, there was a rustling breeze and nothing else. If the songbirds were sharing news, they must be chirping it across town—maybe even in the Seam, though Madge hoped they were too clever to venture where the air was thick with coal dust; her mother had told her it killed them when they lingered there too long. If the merchants’ children were giggling and chatting, taking breaks from their chores to jump rope or pitch a ball, they were inaudible to her. The mayor’s porch faced away from the yard they treated like their playground.
It was angled toward the Justice Building, an enormous block of granite that marked the railroad’s end and beginning. A trio of Peacekeepers—the men who comprised the district’s guard, recognizable by their crisp, bleached uniforms and steel-toed boots—were marching towards her in military lockstep. Madge’s posture was just as straight, her movements as deliberate, but her chin was never raised as high as theirs; she had been trained in a more demure grace.
She shifted until they were out of her eyeline, collapsing the imposing structure into a pile of grey pebbles, easily kicked aside. Rocking her chair forward, the fence became scattered black arrows. Aimed at the clouds, they were harmless, she decided, because whatever they split apart would be reunited as soon as the wind blew in its favor.
It was fortunate the sweetbay magnolias were there to spare Madge the full view. Red seeds were falling from their branches, a bounty for the cardinals, blue jays, and flickers; the white petals were gone for the season. Once she had reached reaping age, finally eligible for the Hunger Games, the annual battle royale, May and June had become months full of dread. As the sun grew harsher, her eyes filled with tears, and as the air grew heavier, she labored to breathe. When the magnolias were white, she felt like her lungs were blackening—and yet, suddenly, inexplicably, she found herself missing the summer flowers.
Autumn should have brought with it a sigh of relief, like it had last year after Reaping Day, the day another girl rode the train to the Capitol, where she would die among strangers in the Hunger Games arena, while Madge walked home at her father’s elbow. She couldn’t understand why her breaths were coming quick and shallow.
At the sound of the door opening, her next inhale was deliberately slow. Expecting a member of the staff, the cook Beulah Crabtree or the housemaid Nell Fern, coming to tell her it was mealtime, she schooled her expression, even though both women had seen Madge in worse condition, crying into her pillow.
When she turned her head, there her father was instead. She smiled brightly, surprised and relieved; at this hour, he was usually working in his study. He didn’t lean against the doorframe or take a seat beside her—it wouldn’t do for the citizens of 12 to see him relaxing—but his returning smile was easy and his dark blue eyes were warm.
“Good morning, darling,” he said. “Darling” was a new term of endearment; until last year, Madge had been his “strawberry shortcake.” “Time to come inside.” He pulled her to her feet, and she looped her arm around his elbow. “Busy day ahead. We’ve got visitors tomorrow.”
“I had a feeling...,” Madge whispered, resting her cheek against his bicep.
“Don’t sulk,” he told her fondly, before testing her. “Tell me how you knew.”
“I saw Beulah bringing in the groceries. The order was too big for the three of us. I checked the calendar for meetings or parties, and there weren’t any scheduled this week.”
“You know, I wasn’t sure about Big Beulah at first, but your mother had the right idea, hiring someone who can lug stuff around by herself. No need for delivery men to be prowling around the house, bothering you.”
Beulah had thick biceps and calves: she was as hearty as her predecessor, Flora Garner, had been frail, petite and prone to bruising; Madge’s mother used to allow Flora to have extra portions of red meat to thicken her blood. No one mentioned her outright anymore—not since she’d left for her new position in the Capitol, after a guest declared that he was desperate to share her fried potatoes and chicken pie with his mistress and his wife. The Undersees unanimously agreed that it was a rare opportunity for a woman from the Seam, a poor miner’s daughter, and encouraged Madge to forget her. Sometimes, secretly, Madge wished that she’d return.
Instead of admitting it, she said, “The delivery men never bothered me. I don’t think they notice me at all.” They averted their eyes.
“Tomorrow, everybody will notice you. You’ll have to oversee the staff. Your mother’s not feeling well.”
Madge almost shook her head, aborting the motion just in time. She set her composition book on the foyer console. “Maybe she’ll feel better by then. Maybe she just needs one more night’s rest.”
“Odds’re against it, I’m sorry to say. She told me this one hit her like a train, and it’s still rolling down the tracks. Lucky we’ve got the morphling for her now. Calms her down, kills the pain. Worth its weight in gold, that stuff. But you know what happens when she’s on a heavy dose…she’s not up to talking.”
While her mother had never been garrulous, she had a talent for subtly directing conversation in her husband’s favor. She could smooth over awkward pauses with a tinkling laugh and a compliment, flattering others without debasing herself or her family and only disparaging 12 when she had no other choice. She’d collected an arsenal of questions she used to turn their attention away from any missteps. Madge had expected to inherit her skills: her mother had always told her they’d grow apace with her permanent teeth.
They didn’t. Polly said that was a natural consequence of her upbringing, which required her to keep her spark contained, locked in her bedroom, disguised as a firefly in a jar. She assured her that all things arrive in their own time, and someday, Madge would find a way to release it without burning.
“You’ll do fine,” her father insisted, so confidently that she almost believed him. “You’re as lovely as my Merrilee and as clever as I was at your age—maybe cleverer. Besides, you’ve got to start sometime. Your mother might’ve babied you a bit too long—sending you to eat with the servants instead of with us, sending you to the nursery as soon as you finished showing off on the piano. It’s natural, I suppose: a mother's instinct. My mama coddled me too, in her way.” His expression hardened. “My papa never did.” Kissing her crown, he promised, “I’ll always take care of you.”
Madge leaned closer, wanting to smile in gratitude, but her face screwed up in disgust against her will. Nell was spraying the mirror with a cleaner that stung her nose. When Nell wiped the glass with an old newspaper, the bodies of glamorous Hunger Games victors crumpled in her fist.
“I didn’t mind staying upstairs,” Madge said. “It gave me more time to study.” He raised an eyebrow, teasingly skeptical. “Alright, maybe I didn’t study all the time…maybe sometimes Polly and I played gin rummy. She was half-way through teaching me poker when she left.” She’d said it was bound to be Madge’s game because all the best players had control of their facial muscles, but she’d retired before Madge ever won.
“What’d she have to gamble with?” he asked.
“We used mint leaves, not coins,” she answered, not wanting to suggest that Polly had been overpaid. After the games, they tossed their winnings in a pitcher of sweet tea to share.
“Well, you’re old enough to learn to play for higher stakes than that. Have you figured out who’s coming yet?”
Madge frowned thoughtfully. It had to be a regular visitor, if he expected her to be able identify them. The problem was, none of the people who came to mind were likely prospects.
The district’s Hunger Games escort, Effie Trinket, arrived every fourth of July, plucking a boy and a girl between twelve and eighteen from obscurity and offering them the opportunity to become Panem’s next star of the battlefield. It couldn’t be Miss Trinket, though, because she only visited on Reaping Day. If one of 12’s tributes had survived, she’d have accompanied them home on the Victory Tour, but 12 had not had a victor since Haymitch Abernathy, twenty-one years ago.
Besides, the Victory Tour traditionally occurred in the winter, ensuring the Games were never far from the citizens’ minds—as if anyone could forget them, with the families of the dead retreating into mourning while victors made appearances on television, bragging about their kills, hawking jewelry and perfumes, and kissing socialites in strobe-lit dance clubs. Madge knew this because, unlike the rest of 12, the Undersees had uninterrupted electricity and uncensored access to Capitol news broadcasts.
If there had been some kind of technical difficulty, she would have anticipated a visit from the electricians, but it couldn’t be one of them either: the wires in the house were working just fine, and those men complained too much about trekking to the mountains for her to believe they’d check on anything before it broke.
The engineers who toured the coal mine had already done an exhaustive study two years ago, when the mine exploded, killing seven miners and stalling production. Coal deliveries had been steady since then; whatever the problem had been, they’d surely resolved it. There was no reason to inspect it again.
The documentarians would not haul their cameras to 12 without mailing scripts in advance. According to her father, their next film was supposed to be about the coal shortages in the Dark Days of the failed rebellion, and they were taking extra time to ensure that his lines made it sound appropriately brutal and futile. Madge hadn’t heard him reciting anyone else’s clunky speeches aloud lately, though. He usually practiced them in front of her and her mother first, calling them his perfect audience.
With a tinge of embarrassment, she admitted, “I’m not sure.”
He was patient. “I got the message yesterday,” he prompted. “Around 8.”
She closed her eyes, trying to focus. Guests gave at least a week’s notice before they took over the mayor’s house. This ensured the Undersees’ staff had enough time to stock up on whatever amenities they required: silk bedding for Miss Trinket, who explained that it kept her hair smooth, though Madge didn’t understand why that was necessary when she hid her curls beneath synthetic wigs; oatmeal soap for the head surveyor, who was plagued by rashes; u-shaped pillows for the head engineer’s crooked spine; and recordings of falling water to put the insomniac head cameraman to sleep. The Hunger Games victors and their mentors—the past victors who taught them how to survive the arena—received medals engraved with the shape of 12’s highest mountain.
Only the inspector general was different. Aquilinus Miller allowed the Undersees a single evening to prepare. The truth was, he wanted to guarantee that the Undersees had no time to conceal their crimes.
They never committed any. Still, Madge could not help but be afraid he would punish them for some imaginary indiscretion. Her mother said she had a “busy mind,” Flora called her “skittish,” and Polly compared her to “a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.” On test days, Madge expected to be accused of cheating, even though her eyes never wandered toward her classmates’ desks. At school sports competitions, she worried that the people next to her on the bleachers would think she was cruel or snobbish because she couldn’t find her voice when they were cheering.
Before she could speak his name, her father confirmed, “It’s Miller.”
“Are we ready?” Her throat felt tight.
He smiled gently. “Of course. Go check on the menu, alright?” Touching her waist and her lower back, he moved her in the direction of the kitchen. “I’ve got a meeting with Cray now, but that shouldn’t take long. Then you and I’ll have a nice lunch together. And later on you can pick out something pretty to wear. That’ll be a treat, won’t it, darling? Remember, your mother keeps the Capitol clothes in the armoire, not the closet.”
He leaned down to kiss her cheekbone, leaving her at the kitchen door, just as the ormolu knocker banged against the wood. Nell hurried to welcome the head peacekeeper while Madge ducked into a shadow.
Usually, her father met with Head Peacekeeper Stephen Cray at the Justice Building. He thought he was starting to act too chummy with the family: her mother had complained that the old man once greeted her with an overlong hug. She often told Madge that she pitied the poor girls from the Seam who had to keep him company in exchange for meat or coins. Madge agreed, even back when she was naive enough to believe that “keeping company” meant playing chess, singing, or reading a storybook aloud. If her mother had ever used the word “sex,” she didn’t recall it.
Other girls had made the mechanics clear to her, recounting their experiences in the school cafeteria. She’d overheard the older ones advising their younger friends how to please him in order to spend less time on their knees. With brittle laughter, they described his body in detail, warning one other about the strange warts on his thigh, the hair on his buttocks, and the scar on his chest shaped like a nettle that made him self-conscious, because he left bruises when he felt insecure. To Madge, it all sounded repulsive.
That was the way of the world, her mother explained later. It was not and would never be Madge’s, however. Thanks to her father, their pantry was always full.