The First Victor

Chapter One

 We haven't been sent back to work yet. The Capitol is still busy catching, killing, imprisoning, and torturing rebels. No doubt trying to plan their revenge on us, too. I sit on my bed, a thin rectangle of two old pieces of cloth sewn together, filled with dirt, and wonder what they will do to us. They already bombed all of District 13, would they do that to other Districts? Surely not. Surely, they've recognized they need us to work for them. The Capitol must be quite enraged with the Districts, after all we cut off their resources for two years. The amount of suffering and loss they faced would make anyone bloodthirsty. That's why we rebelled in the first place. Is this what our future will be? Going back and forth between the Capitol treating the Districts so terribly that we rebel and then us giving the Capitol a taste of their medicine. Just for the Capitol to return the favor and the cycle continues on and on.

Perhaps everything will just go back to how it was before. That would be punishment enough. Life here goes from learning about the jobs our District has - harvesters, plowers, factory workers, millers - and everything that has to do with grain until we start working. Many kids have to start working early like I did, when the parents aren't getting enough to support the family themselves. It's like that for most of us, but if you're lucky enough to not start early, you start working when you turn ten. You keep going to school until you're thirteen, spending half of the week learning and half of it working. After that, you work every day until you die. Which, out here, is usually before you can even turn fifty.

The weather in District 9 is temperamental. It doesn't know whether it wants to flood or drought, the summers can be unreasonably hot and the winters insufferably cold. Unpredictable severe weather like hurricanes, tornadoes, and blizzards threaten to ruin our harvest every week. If you're not dying from machinery accidents or starvation, you're dying from a natural disaster.

It can't get worse than this. There's nothing the Capitol can do as revenge that they haven't already been doing to us. I remove the board covering the empty space of our broken window, searching for the moon to get a hint of the time, but the sky is disguised by thick smoke that refuses to clear. I inhale tentatively, hoping to replenish the oxygen in my lungs, but choke almost immediately and shove the board back into place.

"Well that was dumb," my little brother chuckles from his bed of dirt. "Shut up, Rye," I embarrassingly cough out, proving his point. I'm about to insult him on how much he stinks, the dirt on his skin visible from feet away in the dark, when I remember I'm no better. My hair is stuck together in clumps in the back of my head and sticks out wildly in the front. It's a hot mess, but at least the dirt is less visible in my dark brown hair compared to Rye's light brown, somewhat red hair.

My coughing makes him laugh harder, and I give him an annoyed "Shhh! They're sleeping," I gesture to our brothers sound asleep side-by-side. He rolls his eyes, "If they were gonna wake up it would be from your coughing."

"Yeah, whatever," I mumble and plop back on my bed. "Yeah, whatever," he mocks me. We're silent the rest of the night. He falls asleep before I do, so his imminent snoring keeps me up even longer. By the time I slip into a dream our mother is knocking rampantly at our door, hollering, "Boys! Get up! Mandatory gathering! Now!"