Kalyd Journeyman had not been built to sustain an audience's attention. Before his second Hunger Games had begun, and long before the revelry that proceeded these Hunger Games had ever started, Kalyd had understood this truth and embraced it warmly, because he hadn't particularly minded the way in which humanity had perceived him. He'd leaned against the bows of wooden fishing vessels and stared into magenta skylines, his eyes flitting from sinking suns to the face of his closest friend to the sea and the sky and the ocean spray, and he'd figured that two sorts of people existed on this earth, those who observed the world and those whom the world observed. His friend had fit neatly into the latter category, blind and beautiful as he'd been, but Kalyd himself had always been a spectator, simple to behold and simple to please. And had he remained in District Four for the entirety of his simple life, he would never have needed worry about the eyes of the nation—he'd have lingered happily in the crook of a rowboat for as long as he was able, drinking his fill of the natural world and encouraging other, likeminded spectators to do the same.
Yet he stood today on a wireframe stage miles from the shores of District Four, and he stared into the blackness of a washed-out Capitol plaza, and, under the invisible scrutiny of thousands of spectators, Kalyd acknowledged at last that his role had shifted. Though he had not been built to sustain an audience's attention, the Capitol had painted over his simple foundation with gold leaf and peacock-blue silk and every wonder that their manmade paradise could spare, and the world looked upon him now as a breathing work of art. He'd need to speak to them as a work of art would, with none of the simple mannerisms that would lose an audience's attention; he'd need to smile like the presidential portraits that lined the Capitol walls, wave like a trained performer, grasp the audience within his gloved hands just as the President held him within his own.
But Kalyd did not know how to captivate, and so he approached the podium and opened his mouth with the intention of doing the exact opposite.
"Good evening," he said, his electronically-augmented voice quieter in his own ears than it had ever been before, his heartbeat a whir in his throat. He paused to collect his thoughts, because those first two words had thrown the unwieldy weight of his actions onto his shoulders and because he could feel eyes behind him as well as before him; his escort had instructed him to speak of his personal journey, to honor the Capitol, to cement his own legacy alongside Panem's, and yet he'd found in the minutes before this victory speech that he could not speak a single word about himself. Even now, under the stares of a million citizens, that brilliant, intrinsic quality that he'd imagined that living artwork should possess had not illuminated him, and he did not think that he could pretend that it had.
So he spectated instead.
He'd always been particularly good at viewing things—remembering things, treasuring things, honoring things. And so, when Kalyd opened his mouth and addressed Panem for the first time, he hoped that the audience's stares cut through him like light through glass, that he, prism-like, directed their beams of attention toward the beautiful things on which he'd been fixated since he'd stepped from the cavernous arena.
"I'd like to talk about my fellow tributes," said Kalyd, and he bowed his head as he projected himself one last time from the confines of his own body. "I'd like you to remember them with me."
And for seven minutes, the nation did.
*
The house on the bluff had grown derelict through years of abandonment, its oaken boards rotted and warped and its glass panes caked in a shroud of dust. Kalyd had thought it dismal and depressing when he'd first spotted it, its angular exterior jutting from the cliffs like the skeleton of a long-dead beast, but a few morning walks along the bluff and a few ventures closer to the house's walls had birthed within it a strange, antiquated charm. It looked nothing like Kalyd's victor mansion, nor had it been built to resemble a Capitol home—the architecture was textbook District Four, a combination of pastel-painted surfaces and oversized bay windows and porticoes sprouting from all four sides, and its short-shrift extravagance reminded Kalyd of the merchant's sector that had once characterized his District Four. (They'd done away with the merchant's sector, of course, when the Capitol had standardized housing and built the supervised forum over Dilly's Fountain, but these features still loomed in Kalyd's mind as if they'd existed only two years before. Despite the inherent optimism he harbored, his transition to modern life had been painfully difficult.)
