✓ | Iron ↠ The Hunger Games

three ━ death sentences

CHAPTER THREE;
death sentences

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Eight hundred thousand people — that's a rough estimation for the population of Six cramming themselves into the square, including the adults and younger children spectating from the sidelines.

Every Reaping Day, Vesper is reminded of just how many people she doesn't know. If she were picked, would anyone bother to volunteer? Partly because it's a tradition out of practice — the absurdity of stepping forward for what is essentially suicide — but she knows she couldn't count on the vast majority of the hanging faces in the crowd to bail her out. After all, she isn't sure she would do it for them — the flogging of the frail man still stands as a haunting example.

Twenty minutes from now, almost eight hundred thousand people, give or take a few thousand, will partake in the Reaping. The names of one girl and one boy will be picked — if not someone close to them, the majority of Six will carry on with their lives amidst the Games.

Blythe's still trailing cautiously at her side, reluctant to say her goodbyes, but she can't go any further when the seemingly endless queues of children begin to accumulate. She starts scanning the area around her, as if she's searching for a moment more to find the words she can't quite say. Solemnly, Vesper manages to catch her gaze and nods over to Axel, who's watching as stoically as he can with his parents as Icarus departs from them.

"Go," Vesper says. "I'll see you on the other side."

She hopes.

Wordlessly, Blythe complies. She doesn't turn to the queues until she's safe with Axel — who, without a moment's hesitation, slings his arm around her shoulders protectively — meaning she no longer has an excuse to postpone the eerie, annual grind of the Reaping routine.

Vesper, like everyone else, joins a wavering line of girls just like her, and yet not one of them could she place if she tried. Even with her sharp memory, the sheer vastness of Six's population makes finding any familiar faces a task equivalent to scouring for a needle in a haystack. A cough here, a choked sob there. Some of the older ones have numbed themselves to the rollercoaster ride that is the Reaping. The youngsters struggle more, as they cling onto their mothers and cry out, before being heartlessly pried away by a Peacekeeper.

As she draws closer to the tables — perhaps those same ones Dusty, their ride home last night, was delivering to the Epicentre — Vesper softly rubs the skin of her index finger with her thumb, as if she's preparing for the sharp pinprick that she and everyone else receives every year. It's nothing much, but for some reason it never ceases to fill her with a sense of dread.

The line begins to shrink and split into two, as sullen teenagers wander with bleeding fingertips to their allocated spaces in the square with people of their age. Before long, she's watching from behind as a girl goes through the whole procedure of signing in — the rough handling of her finger, the sharp inhale through gritted teeth as the machine makes the cut, and the pressing of her fingertips into the paper.

"Next," says the stern-looking woman at the table. Vesper steps forward, extending her hand out to her — in years gone by, she has learned not to restrain against the trials of the Reaping. She still remembers how on her first Reaping Day, when asked for her hand to sign in, she jerked it away and refused to give her blood. It nearly resulted in a public flogging — of a child — had her father not stepped in and calmed her down. The instinct to fight back is still there, but she suppresses it through her muscles gone rigid and her clenched jaw, as she feels the sharp sting of the needle piercing her fingertip. Her fingertip being pressed firmly onto a printed square on the pristinely white paper smudges the maroon bead into a smear on her skin, a fresh coat of the stuff oozing out of the tiny opening if she presses on the sides.