Chapter 1
PART I: ASHES ON THE SEA
I stay underwater longer than necessary, feeling only peace as my limbs swish through the deep blue ocean.
There’s coral below, coral I’m supposed to be tagging and sampling, but for now I just hover weightless. They hand out the sea-goggles when we’re on assignment below water, and I’ll never stop wishing I could see like this all the time. Bright anemones, schools of silver fish, even a stony octopus on the other side of the rock that watches through those inhuman eyes.
Always watching.
There’s something about it I don’t trust. Dad thinks I’m crazy. He says an octopus is just another fish and when they’re fried up, they all taste the same. Maybe that’s why this particular octopus has always felt so evil. He knows what we did to his brethren. He’s plotting to use those slimy tentacles in revenge.
But even a vengeful mollusc cannot dampen my peace here. I allow myself just one moment longer below water before emerging for breath. I could have held another two minutes, but with replenished lungs I’ll last longer down amongst the coral. Besides, I need the tags and sampler, and Oenone emerges at the same time I do for fresh supplies.
“I’ve catalogued all the eastern side of the rock,” she says, pulling her sea-goggles free and dropping a handful of specimens into the box on the floating buoy. “How far did you get?”
I bite my lip guiltily. Oenone loves aquatic research. She puts her hand up for the assignment every time and I begrudgingly do it with her, even though I’d rather be out on the fishing boats, or crafting nets, or in the lab designing the conditions for our establishing aquatic farms. It used to be that I did in fact opt for such things as my work assignment, leaving Oenone to needle and bribe someone else into buddying up with her on the reef.
But lately I’ve spent a lot of time amongst the coral. Mostly because Oenone will soon be a victor or dead, and I don’t know which one will be worse.
Either way, I lose my best friend. We’ve all seen how Finnick Odair changed after his games. How the fame went to his head, how he’d rather spend his time at Capitol parties and rarely speaks to any of us in the district anymore. How above us all he thinks himself.
Finnick and I used to be... friends? No, not at all. Acquaintances? Barely. Our fathers worked the same ships and we used to join them when we were younger, before we were old enough for the Academy or work assignments. Our first day on the ships together, I must have been around eleven years old, and when a net got stuck around a piece of ship wreckage, I jumped into the water to untangle it without even thinking. When I clambered back overboard, Finnick gave me a strange sort of smile and said, “You swim like a mermaid.”
I frowned, suddenly self-conscious in that way only eleven year old girls can be, and unsure if he was making fun. “A what?”
“A mermaid. You know.”
I stared at him blankly. With light dancing in his eyes he leaned in closer and said, “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen one. Out on the rocks of Murphy island?”
I suddenly knew what he was talking about. Children’s stories. Mom was never great at reading and Dad never kept still long enough to bother with books or tales, but I’d caught enough over the years that Finnick’s words jogged my memory. Beautiful half-woman half-fish. Did I truly swim like one? I’d always thought it more like the porpoises that played alongside the boats in the summer, as close as I could get to moving like a fish. It seemed simple to me. Sea animals don’t kick like a pair of broken pliers, and surely they know best.
“How do you know how mermaids swim?” I asked cautiously.
Finnick answered, “Because they’re my friends.”
To this day, I don’t know if he was lying. Of course he was lying, I remind myself fiercely. Mermaids don’t exist. He’s proven by now that there’s no level he won’t stoop to for attention. But he took to calling memermaidafter that, anytime we passed each other in the Academy halls. I grew to dread it. Any group of girls in the vicinity would immediately begin to titter and ask me if I knew Finnick, if we were friends, if I could introduce them. I should be grateful he ignores me now, instead. Even if it stung that first time it happened, as we stood in line together at the supplies store, watching his eyes roam blankly over me as though he didn’t know me at all.
Screw him.
Oenone won’t act like that after her games. She won’t, I tell myself fiercely, diving down to the coral and beginning the menial task, careful not to cut myself on the rock. It’s already been decided, after all. Oenone will be the volunteer tribute this year, nominated by the Academy. She’s headstrong, and physically strong, with incredibly honed muscles from her years of Academy training and working the ships. She could crush a man’s head with her thick set legs and barely break a sweat. And she’s mentally fearless, too. She knows she’ll win. I just hope she’s right.
And now I’ll never be District Four’s tribute. Not that I was ever too interested. Like most of us, I enrol in the Academy each year for the food allowance, a monthly delivery of Capitol grain and supplies without which, we’d be stuck on a very bland diet of fish and the occasional traded spice or stick of butter in which to cook it. Academy students and their families receive sweet root vegetables harvested in Eleven, small amounts of meat from Ten, along with the essentials. It’s good, but it never seems to stretch far enough, and even with our meagre portioning to make it last the month, the last week becomes tight and we end up on mostly fish again.
And despite the variety, it’s never as fancy as the winnings packages after a tribute wins the games. There’s none of the fruit. Though I’ve never much cared to enter the games, though I’m privately relieved I’ve made it to eighteen years old without being deemed the district’s best chance at a victor and assigned to volunteer, I sometimes think it might be worth it for the oranges.
I can still taste them, even here underwater, the way they burst across my tongue and filled me with equal parts surprise and joy. I used to race eagerly to the square on package arrival days, purely to get the supplies home and rifle through them and clutch an orange in my water-wrinkled hands. Some were tiny and could be peeled and sectioned with my fingers, some were like rocks the size of my head that had to be dug into with a spoon. I imagine eating all the oranges I like in the Capitol, then paying the price in the arena. Probably worth it.
“What’s wrong?” I ask Oenone some time later as we wait for the boat to pick us up. She’s clinging to the buoy and looking awfully green. I’m twisting around in the water, my dark hair swirling and making patterns in the ripples that cast out everywhere.
“I’ve lost my sea legs,” she says.
“You’re not even on the boat yet.” But true enough, Oenone has been struggling more on the water. She won’t touch half our food, either, claiming she’s sick of all the fish. Everyone’s putting it down to nerves before the reaping. But I’m starting to worry she’s losing herself entirely. Like by the time of the games, she’ll no longer be District Four’s victor, but an entity all of her own.
Oenone presses her forehead into the edge of the wooden buoy. “It’s been a long day.”
“It’s about to get even longer,” I mutter, as the boat reaches us and we see it’s Sider operating.
“Ladies,” he says smoothly. “Hop on board the cosy-up cruiser.”
“I would rather choke on my own vomit,” Oenone grumbles, which as we set off, looks like it’s becoming likely.
“You ought to be nicer to me,” Sider says smugly. “When we’re in the arena, I could be all that stands between life and death, darling.”
“When we’re in the arena you’llbemy life or death, idiot.”
“Suit yourself.” Sider shrugs his muscled shoulders then begins to croon. “You’re the apple of my eye, girl...”
Oenone groans. I roll my eyes. Sider’s been into her as long as I can remember, and though she’d never admit it in a million years, I’ve seen her lips thin if another girl talks to him, or if he sits through class without fixing her with this sort of attention. In fact, despite the sickly green tinge to her skin, she’s suppressing a small smile even now. They’ll probably end up married.
Then I remember they’re both heading into the arena, and only one of them will come out alive.
In fact, it was around the time they were each chosen that Oenone got super prickly with him. Maybe she doesn’t want to explore whatever’s going on. Maybe there’s simply no point anymore.
It’s a shame. I’ll miss Sider when she wins.
————
“Get that on to broil,” Mom says briskly when I get home.
Her hair’s still in the tight bun, her face still lined from the day’s work. She processes the seafood we catch at the sorting centre, separating it by type, weight, quality. Upon coming home after a long day, she runs a bath and scrubs her skin raw for about an hour. We have to get the strong soap from the store, the one that smells like flowers, just to get the smell out. I don’t know why she bothers. Dad doesn’t put half as much effort into scrubbing away the smell of fish guts, and in my opinion that’s worse, even if it is milder. I wonder what I smell like, standing in the kitchen with my still-damp hair and silver swimsuit beneath my plain clothes. Sweat and salt-water, probably.
“Will Dad be home?” I call out, though I don’t need to.
It’s only a small cottage and you can hear a pin drop through the cardboard walls. But you can also hear the ocean, and we have an unspoken rule to always keep the back door and kitchen window open, so the sound of it fills me completely. Up here where we live, on the northern side of the Row, the waves get so high some of us take massive planks out to ride them. I’ve never much enjoyed it. I feel trapped, beholden to a lump of wood and unable to move freely while standing on it. It always ends in a mad tumble beneath the wave, anyway, fingernails scraping sand and choking on salt water, then having to find the darn board because it’s inevitably shot fifty feet away on the current. But though I hold no love for boarding the waves on the Row, I can’t imagine life without the sound of them.
“Out on the boat,” Mom says from her bedroom. “Overnight. He’ll be back tomorrow.”
I hum quietly as I set to work, preparing just the two fillets as it’s only us home. As I pick out the bones, I try to imagine life with a big family. I try to imagine having siblings like Oenone with her three brothers, though any time I bring it up with her, she scoffs and complains and says I don’t know how good I’ve got it. Maybe I don’t.
But there was one baby before me, a boy who turned blue in the night and stopped breathing, and another girl after who died before she was even born. I’m not sure which broke my mother worse. Or whether that’s why there’s always been this river between us with no bridge. Not an unkindness. But a distance. It might be that she looks at me and sees only them. And I’m a perpetual middle child living alone, never quite here nor there, never quite finding a place.
I grab the broiler tray without a mitt and a curse falls from my lips, one that would earn me a smack under any other conditions. The searing metal has burnt a streak across my palm and the sensation rages like fire even as I duck outside to run the tap, thrusting my hand beneath the rusty old contraption and willing the water to soothe the pain. Stupid, impulsive Annie. I sigh and lower myself to the ground, sitting cross-legged on the planks of wood and uncaring when I get damp. I’m going to be here a while.
When I can bear to look at the wound, there’s only the one blister, and it’s not too ugly. I need to get it into the seawater.
“Oh, dear,” Mum tuts when I come back inside, inspecting my palm. “No, you don’t want to risk infection. I’ll wrap up a seaweed poultice.”
“So much for our lovely dinner,” I mutter.
“You’re not getting out of cooking that easy.” Mum emerges from the kitchen with a bundle of green gel and a bandage. As she sets to work she asks, “How’s Oenone doing?”
“She’s okay.” I swallow, and then if only to distract myself from the hiss of pain at the contact, “She’s not herself.”
“Of course she’s not,” Mum murmurs softly, then clamps her lips together like she’s said something awful.
She does that on occasion. She’ll let words slip and then it’s as though she’s instantly trying to swallow them back down again. Mostly innocuous things, but almost always in relation to the games, or the Capitol, or the conditions at work. I don’t understand it. You’d think President Snow himself stands behind her at all times, waiting with bated breath for her to say something in the slightest way ungrateful to order her execution.
I shouldn’t be so cavalier. I’ve heard whispers of the other districts, how the peacekeepers almost match the citizens in number, how they linger constantly on work assignments and micromanage everything from public appearances to mealtimes. I try to picture our peacekeepers acting in such a manner. They’re more like silent sentinels. Stationed throughout the Academy, along the beaches, usually a couple to a boat if it’s a long or big job, like Dad’s usually are. They don’t bother us. We don’t bother them. Why would we?
When my hand’s all wrapped up, I put the fish under the heat, more carefully this time. Though the last thing I want is to check the fire that keeps the oven warm, I have no choice but to open the hatch and squeeze another small log in there with a poker. When the weather’s warm, it’s too hot to even light, and we eat the fish raw half the time, sliced thinly and wrapped in sticky grain with whatever we can muster from the food allowance. Or we use the outdoor fires and steamers, putting on a whole pot of mussels and cockles early in the day and scooping out the flesh to periodically snack.
Mom and I eat our food, the fish with simple grain, and then I duck into the bathroom to bathe in the shallow tub. It always feels tight and restricted, always a chore to run the soap through my hair and over my body. Oenone loves baths. I teased her at first, asking what she’ll do in the arena without her hour-long baths to soak in. As the day draws closer, I don’t tease anymore. It’s not funny. None of it is.
If Mom said those words, she’d be biting her tongue.
Two days, I remind myself, swishing my hand through the water. That’s all. Two days until the reaping.There’ll be more to come after that. The Academy year begins and ends with the reaping. There’ll be a graduation ceremony. I’ll be given the option to choose my permanent work assignment or be a ‘floater,’ stationed wherever they need me at any given time. We’ll lose the food allowance. But somehow, I struggle to give any of it much weight. I just need to get through the reaping. Through the games. We’ll be on reduced hours while they show the games anyway, so we can watch our tributes in the arena. It’ll be Oenone up there on the large screens in the town square. Sider too, of course, but Oenone has to win. She can win.
She can.
