"a trojan horse," she says quietly in his ear, "is an old district three term. it's used to describe a bit of technology that looks completely innocent at first. but anyone who touches it will activate the virus buried inside. and that virus will co...
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January, 75 years after the Treaty of Treason (75 A.T.T.)
On the morning that her Victory Tour is scheduled to start, Katniss Everdeen, co-winner of the 74th Hunger Games, walks into her opulent new study in her opulent new mansion only to find President Coriolanus Snow sitting calmly behind the desk, paging through a book as he waits patiently for an audience with her, looking for all the world like this was just another day in Panem, as if he regularly pays house visits to the children he tried to kill.
He holds up a finger, telling Katniss to wait. A mind game, someone will later explain to her, to make her feel unbalanced in her own house, to establish himself as the one with all the power and her as the one without any before he even says a word. He scans the rest of the page and then closes the book, handing it to a young woman in the shadows that Katniss hadn't yet noticed (for until this moment she'd stood entirely still), and fixes his cold, watery gaze on the only female Victor from District 12. Katniss fights to stop the mingled fear and rage welling up in her chest from showing in her face, but she suspects President Snow senses it anyway, from the way his eyes gleam triumphantly as they fix on hers.
"Miss Everdeen," he says softly, dangerously, like a copperhead poised to strike, "might I suggest that for the sake of simplicity, you and I agree not to lie to one another in this conversation?"
Katniss knows what she is supposed to say. "Yes. It would be simpler." She agrees.
She thinks her easy agreement will take Snow by surprise, but he only smiles knowingly. The woman standing behind him in the shadows, however, twitches almost involuntarily, alerting Katniss to her presence once again. She looks a little familiar, somehow, though Katniss knows she's not from District 12 and she isn't dressed in the excessive fashions of the Capitol. But where else would Katniss have seen her before?
She is quiet, Katniss notes. She hasn't yet made a sound, this woman, and this is what makes Katniss realize that she must be an Avox, though why Snow would bring one all the way on a low profile visit to District 12 is beyond her comprehension. Though perhaps it is the fact that an Avox would be unable to tell anyone of the proceedings that explains the woman's presence in the room. Katniss feels a stab of pity for the young woman. She is not much older than herself, maybe twenty-one or twenty-two, and has large eyes that should be expressive but instead are unnaturally blank.
