Jeopardy: The Fourth Quarter Quell

Grey - Cleo

Cleo

Grey gets boring after a while, even if you're used to it. Especially if you're used to it. Every day I wake up and look out of my window and all I can see is a mass of uniform grey concrete buildings, just like mine. Some adventurous souls have tried hanging colourful curtains up in the windows, but colour is hard to come by in District Six, despite the lavish Justice Building.

That's where I need to go today.

But first, work. I seize my overalls from the basket on my floor. Surprise surprise, they're grey too. They also don't fit well, digging around my shoulders and revealing my ankles. District Six's infallible, machine-like precision obviously doesn't stretch to clothes. But like I said, I'm used to it.

I don't even know why I wear the overalls. You can wear anything in my line of work. But I guess it just seems easier, if everybody is wearing them. The only other outfits most people have are reaping outfits, and nobody would dare try and wear those unless absolutely necessary.

I'm not painting a very nice picture here. It's not all that bad. There are very few people in poverty in District Six, and the ones who are are looked after, seen as broken cogs in a machine that need to be fixed. Everybody has a job. I guess it's the morphling. Deep in the middle of the endless construction works, trains and hovercrafts and helicopters, there are medical factories. In theory, you can't smuggle from them. In reality all you need is a white lab coat and a confident swagger. And you can always buy it off the market at the Hub. There are snatches of greenery in District Six, small foresty places with brooks bubbling through them. But they're towards the outskirts of the district and, like most, I've never been there. I've never had the time.

The flat is eerily silent this time in the morning. Both Ma and Pa are at work. Izzy will have been reluctantly carted off to school and Mark will be at the Hub already, trading gossip. This time of year, it's mostly about rumoured volunteers and suchlike. He doesn't have to worry now, well, not about himself. He probably worries like mad about Izzy and I, even though Izzy isn't even reaping age yet and I'm more likely to be chosen this year than ever.

So it's just me. I don't like the space, the emptiness. I need noise and bustle and shouting and swearing. Ma has left me a roll out on the counter, as well as the remains of Izzy's breakfast, wrapped up in brown crinkly paper. She's a picky eater, is our Iz. She doesn't like the oily feeling of our traditional, wheel-like rolls and instead prefers the District Four bread, so salty that it practically dehydrates you after one bite. We don't get those in the market place very often, though, so when some somehow end up there, we have to be quick to seize on them. Usually we just get District Five stuff, miniscule bite-sized rolls with almost no flavour and by the texture of it, stuffed with gravel.

I take a chunk off the remainder of the Four bread, wincing as the salty tang practically shrivels my lips. Whoever made this bread is probably looking at the sea right now, close enough to smell it. What does it smell like? What about District Four? On reaping days, what we see on the screen looks colourful and sparkly and the complete opposite to here.

All this flashes through my mind and vanishes once I've brought myself to swallow the roll. Seeing the other districts is a pipe dream. Only the best engineers, the green-overalls group, get to do that, whizzing across Panem and keeping the trains moving.

Izzy and Ma have tried to keep the house cheerful. Well, what that actually means is that when Izzy was smaller she stole some pens from school and scribbled on the walls. A rainbow of colours play around the screen and dance behind the chairs. It's not anything identifiable, just scrawl, but it's home. Nobody has the heart to even try and scrub it off.

I wrap up my bread roll in the brown paper and shove it into my pocket, nearly ripping the material. Usually I bargain something edible from one of the other stalls, but I may as well just in case I don't get anything to work with. My trading bag is still in the middle of the floor from yesterday; I didn't get anything useful so it may as well all come with me today.