Pyromania | The 60th Hunger Games

TWO

My home is like every other home in District Two, wood-panelled, thatched roof and a square patch of grass to call a garden. It looks like the cottages that rich people owned in my Granddad's history books, they had been the staple of living in the "countryside", a place that doesn't exist to the district or capitol residents. The land outside of Panem is uninhabitable. That's what we are told; that's why we have the fences.

I often wonder how true that really is. Last year, during the week the tributes prepare for the Hunger Games, I had wrapped myself in an old cloak and followed my Father to work. It was barely dawn and the summer air was already hot, mist raised from the ground as the rain from the previous evening evaporated. This, along with my unusually tall stature, helped conceal me among the groggy workers leaving the village. I assumed my Father worked in the stone mines like most over people, but that wasn't where I was headed.

I trudged along the path to town and was surprised to see my Father walk past the mine entrance. He continued on the same path as me: across the square, around the Justice Building, and... onto a train. A few of the men and peacekeepers called out to him and greeted him as he boarded the train and, from the shadows, I watched it departed into a tunnel that led into the heart of the old mountain that had been mined until it could no longer be mined.

My Father's occupation has been an anomaly since, but I have never cared to ask. Instead, I focus more on what happens in the places you can only see from the mountainside.

While the entire district is situated somewhere on the mountain, none of the paths are as steep as the ones up to the older entrances into the higher levels of the old mine. Of course, none of those paths exist anymore. Years of lower-level mining and avalanches have deemed the mountainside unsafe.

And yet there I was on that misty morning. Sweat was all but dripping from my body, but the view from a lone tree that had somehow withstood an avalanche was worth it. There were splinters in my fingers and the old burn scars on my palms were inexplicably white against the rest of my hand. The red skin the same colour as the rising sun and the spots of blood on my grazed knee. My Mother believed the story I had constructed to excuse the rip in my trousers, knowing she'd go berserk if she knew I'd climbed the loose avalanche path- if only I could have told her about the green and yellow and purple fields that lay just beyond the dense forest surrounding the district, or described the lights of the Capitol that was much closer than Granddad often described.

I had stayed in that tree until the sun was lighting up the entirety of Panem and steam was rising from the factories in district eight on the horizon. I spent most of that morning skidding and sliding on loose dirt back down the mountain, taking my time so the cloak didn't snag and rip because that wasn't as easily explained away. Once I returned home, my mother was cooking breakfast and Granddad was watching the highlights of that year's Reaping.

This year's Reaping is tomorrow. It's all anyone can talk about and there are whispers all around the villages about how much they bet on which Academy kid would volunteer this year. Obviously, all the bets were on Artemis and Lewis. At this rate, my odds of being picked are next to nothing, and even if I should be the inconvenienced girl, there is always an agreed Academy student.

I saunter through the kitchen, where my Mother is busy chopping up carrots for tonight's dinner. She barely manages a greeting before I've circled the island and crossed into the hallway. The television is on and Granddad is watching the highlights of the last few Hunger Games where everyone's favourite host, Caesar Flickerman, is discussing the mechanics with the Games Master, Atticus Coupe. Their drawling Capitol accents chase me upstairs and into my bedroom.

It's a small room. Barely big enough for a set of draws, a desk and a single bed which substitutes as a desk chair. The room used to be the ensuite to the master bedroom but, when Granddad retired from his peacekeeper duties, my Father managed to get permission to renovate it. For a week or so, I shared my old bedroom with my Mother while my Father shared a double bed with Granddad. Those nights are forever burned into my mind, and I gained a new respect for my Father since my Mother, a usually calm and gentle woman, snores so aggressively I could only find sleep in the bathtub of the ensuite anyway.