Ab Extra, Salus {Part 5 | Chapters 29-30}

[ficofandalasia]

Part Five: The Survivor



Chapter Twenty-Nine

“Tell me about Yensid.”

It had become comfortable for us, this way of talking. It was easier for me than trying to form real questions, and I got the feeling that it was easier for Kida than trying to come up with a way to explain everything that had happened. I felt as if I had woken up in a different world from the one I had known, and I didn’t know where to look first when everything around me had been changed.

“There isn’t that much known,” said Kida darkly. “I doubt we’ll find out even when the last fortress is bought down, and he is found. My grandfather says that Yensid became President before the Dark Days, did away with elections during them. He’s ruled ever since.”

I couldn’t remember if my grandmother had ever said anything like that. I would have to ask her one day. “Nobody could live for that long.”

“Who knows what they did to him in the Capitol? Replaced his organs when they failed?” She had a point. “It was him who shaped Panem to what it is today, though. He made the Districts. I mean, they had been there before him, but he shut them off from, each other.”

“Really?” I sat on my bed, stiffly cross-legged. My legs ached from the position, but it made me feel comfortable inside. Like there was a me to think about. I had a child’s toy in my hands, a circle with notches around the outside and various coloured threads, which made patterns like a spider’s web. I had been good with it once. “How do you know?”

“Seventy-four years feels like a long time, but... maybe it isn’t. My grandfather heard stories from his parents, his grandparents. The Districts used to be more... varied in what they produced. They still had to trade things, but not like they do now. So District One would produce most of its own food, but it would also collect fur and sell that, or gold for the electronics in District Three. District Three would trade machines for things that it couldn’t grow. District Four ate its own fish, District Eleven its own produce.

“The Capitol, though, and District Thirteen... they were different to the others. District Thirteen just produced energy, hardly anything else, and had to trade it all away. And the Capitol... well, they just sent people out to oversee things.”

I tried to imagine a world like that. The houses in the Victor’s Village probably had more District One produce than most of the District One people did. Even so, they were made of stone from District Two, with tools from District Three. We ate fish from District Four and meat from District Ten and grain and vegetables from Districts Eight and Eleven. Everything had been bought there at the order of the Capitol, and even what we had of our own making had belonged to the Capitol before it was given to us.

Kida watched me carefully. Her posture had not changed - it was easy, almost relaxed, one arm on the back of her chair and one ankle hooked over the other, stretched out in front of her. But her eyes were still keen, never wavering from me.

“If the Districts could manage well,” she continued, more slowly now, shaping the words before she spoke them, “then why would they need the Capitol? It needed them. And I think - many people think - that District Thirteen realised it, and that was what caused the Dark Days. That the Districts could have removed the Capitol like plucking off a tick.”

“Is that what the rebellion is doing now?” I managed. Coloured threads tangled in my fingers, but I barely saw them. “It isn’t like that now. We can’t...”

“No, the Districts aren’t as separate as they used to be,” said Kida. “But how they are is unnatural. There has never been anything as artificial as this before.” Now she was sliding upright in her chair, a light flashing in her eyes and excitement cracking through her voice. “There are history books, in Atlantis, from before the Dark Days. They say-”

“Atlantis?” My voice came out louder than I had meant it to, and the word seemed to boom in the hospital room. I winced, but Kida did stop her quickening stream of words, appearing to gather herself as she took a deep breath. “What is Atlantis?”

“Atlantis is an island,” she said. “Outside of Panem’s control. And it is where the rebellion has grown.”

I had been right about boats.

“The thing about the sea,” said Kida, her eyes glowing again, “is that it is alive. Not alive, I suppose, but... it always changes. Like it has its own thoughts. The Capitol don’t understand it, and neither do District Three, so they can’t make machines that can sail there the way that people from District Four can. Not many of us become Peacekeepers either, and those who do aren’t usually the sea-folk proper.

“No matter how many cameras or bugs the Capitol uses, they can’t control everything that happens out at sea. Saltwater always consumes things sooner or later. And even District Four sailors aren’t perfect: every so often, a boat gets swept away, out to the south, and we think it is gone forever. It is how my father...”

For a moment the light in her eyes dimmed, and she looked away from my face. I had the sense that I should look away from the pain that flickered there, now that her words had gone where she had not meant them to, but it was difficult. If she remembered her father at all, it was faint, or fuelled by other people’s stories. My father, my Baba, was out there somewhere and I didn’t even know if he was alive or dead, and it took all of my self-control not to scream for him to come and wake me up out of this nightmare.

Finally, Kida gathered herself to continue. “Sometimes a boat disappears. Even more rarely, it comes back. And a few of the sailors, when they came back, talked of an island, outside the Capitol’s reach, where they still knew about what had happened before the Districts, before Panem even existed, maybe even as far back as the disasters that changed the world. They called it Atlantis, though I think it had another name once.

“Eventually, people began to go there deliberately. They learnt the waters, and once that was done, they realised that they could go both there and back. If done well - and with luck - the Capitol did not even need to know. Finally, there was somewhere, somewhere on land, where the Capitol did not go.”

“And that is where the rebellion came from,” I finished quietly.

She shrugged. “Well, as I said, the rebellion came from every person that hated the Capitol. But it is where it grew, I suppose, or at least grew best. It was where ideas could be discussed outside the Capitol, where arguments could be made, and where plans could be laid out. Though plans, of course, had to change to take account for what we found in Panem...”

I caught the last of her words, and looked up sharply. “We? Have you been there?”

“No.” It came out as a sigh, a weary breath. “I just forget sometimes that, well, no. It does not matter. The victors and their mentors were the best way to pass information from District to District, during the Games and the Victory Tour. But those are only twice a year. It is why everything took so long to come to this.

“Finally, though, it did. My Reaping was the signal to the people across all of the Districts. Those that other mentors had found reliable; it all spread by word of mouth, of course, explained to them just as I have explained it to you. As far as most people are concerned, it will be perfectly fine to hate the Capitol, to rise up and cast them aside. But after that, we will need to think about what will happen in the future.”

“And what is that?”

“Who knows? It is the future, after all.”

For all of their technology in the Capitol, as far as I knew they did not have machines that could foretell the future. Perhaps if they had, they would have seen this rebellion coming and quashed it before it could even begin. If what Kida had said was true, though - and I had only one reason, my own doubt of reality, to believe that it might not be - then the Dark Days had never really ended any war. It had just put it off a while longer.

Kida rose to her feet as I was still lost in thought, my head bowed. Her touch on my shoulder drew my attention back to her, and she gave me a bold smile. “What I hope, though, is that we will find some more natural way to live again. One where the Capitol does not take the heads from the fish before they are returned to us. Where we can actually get some return from the work which we do, and have some say about what is left over from it.”

“That’s a lot of voices,” I said. The roar of the faceless crowds that lined the parade grounds of the Capitol filled my mind, sent my heart pounding in my chest as I tried to hold on to now, to here. “Surely someone will be louder than the others?”

“Yes, some people will be louder than others. But if many people speak together, they are more powerful than any one voice can be. It has been done before, or so I have heard. And if we have learnt it once, surely we can learn the same lesson again?”

For that, I did not have a reply, and she left without saying any more but with one last smile. I wished that I had a fraction of her faith, but I supposed that she and her pack had not been the ones to kill in the Arena. With a thousand voices screaming at me to kill, though, I had done so.

I looked down at my hands, the faint scars, my nails still bearing their indented lines. But the scars from that terrible rain in the Arena was gone, and so were the older ones, from where I had still be learning to use weapons or start fires or even just cut meat. I was missing all of the little marks that had made me, and only had left what the Capitol had seen free to give. No, not to give, to inflict.

But I am me, I told myself, with the even silence of my own thoughts. For now, I did not bother with a name.

They found my mother next. Well, probably not ‘next’; for all I knew, there were hundreds of prisoners in the Capitol’s cells, and thousands of people to put back in touch with each other. In my life, though, my mother was the second person to be declared alive, and because she had been held in the Capitol we were able to meet.

“I want to go to her,” I said to the nurse.

She shook her head, and my heart seemed to ache in my chest. “Empty apartments are being used as shelters. Your mother would be sharing with other people. It’s best if she comes here instead; I’m sure that we can find another bed from somewhere, or at least something. She can share this room with you, if you want.”

The relief in my face was almost strong enough for me to think that it was everything that I had been hoping for. Arrangements were made to have us reunited as soon as possible - only possible when people were in the same District, the nurse reported to me - and I received the message at sunrise and my mother at sunset.

I had managed to get out of bed and into proper clothes that had been found somewhere for me. They felt strange, and were probably Capitol cast-offs to judge by the thick fur of the vest and the baggy, ballooning pants, but they were clothes and not shapeless hospital pants or gowns, with my hair brushed and parted down the middle, I looked a little pale and thin but, the nurse assured me, passably well. I hadn’t yet seen myself in a mirror.

My mother arrived shortly after dinner, which I had struggled to chew enough times to make it soft enough to swallow, rather than having it stick in my throat. I sat on the foot of the bed, bare feet dangling and feeling ridiculous, when there was another light rap at the door and then it opened, slowly again, my body so jerky that I could not even move fast in comparison.

“Mother.” I threw my arms around her before she could even speak, and my word was half-muffled in her hair as I squeezed her tightly. Her arms wrapped around me in return, feeling as if she was clinging to me. She felt frail to my touch, not starved but weakened, and in the instant that I had seen her face before drawing her close there had been shadows there.

“Oh, Mulan,” she said, murmuring into my shoulder as she held me close once again. I had not been one for hugs when I was younger, but now it felt like the most important thing in the world to be sure that she was real, and even as she drew back and placed her hands on my cheeks to scan my face I realised that I had a smile on my face. I hadn’t felt like smiling in such a long time that it made my cheeks hurt, but it didn’t matter. Grandmother was alive and safe in District One, and Mother was back here with me, and...

And each step was more than I could ever have thought to hope for. My smile faltered, not just from thoughts of Baba and Ping but when I saw the sagging of the skin at my mother’s jaw, the faint greenish cast to her cheeks in the harsh hospital light. The morphling must have done more damage than I had realised.

“It’s all right,” I managed to make myself say. “We’ve got this far, haven’t we?” Please, let us have all have got this far, the words that I didn’t add but which lingered too closely to my tongue. I hugged my mother tightly again, closing my eyes, as finally she began to cry into my shoulder. Part of me wished that I could cry with her, but in many ways it was easier to just hold her and let her do the crying instead, not least because I knew exactly what I had to tell her would happen in order for things to right themselves again.

Chapter Thirty

They day that they found my father was the same day that the last Capitol stronghold fell. I never did find out for certain which one of them actually came first, because by the time that the news from District Two reached the Capitol, the first celebrations were apparently already underway.

My mother was asleep. She slept a lot these days, but she was coming back, slowly, talking like she had before the Reaping. She worried about my hair, which was still uneven, and was trying to work out a way that she could cut it to make it look nice again. She promised that she’d let me get whatever clothes I wanted, when we got back home. Just once, when she was holding me tightly, she touched my chest with a questioning look, but when I choked on an attempt to explain she told me that it didn’t matter, and just squeezed me tighter. I wasn’t sure that I had words to reassure her in return, or even to explain how much her words meant to me. So while she was asleep, I watched over her, and tried to put together words that would not come.

Every so often, in some sort of desperation, I would glance towards the corner of the room and hope that Ping would be there. He still wasn’t.

There was a light knock at the door, but I didn’t respond. Permission was an old idea. The door opened, and I turned my head to see another of the nurses. They didn’t wear name badges, and had never introduced themselves, but I recognised this one. Reddish-brown hair worn in a bun, square-framed glasses and a gentle touch; her accent wasn’t Capitol, though I didn’t recognise it.

“Mulan,” she said, a touch of urgency in her voice. “They’ve identified your father.”

Identified. The word closed around me, like grey fogging around the edges of my sight. Not found, identified. I tried to imagine world without my father in it, without his steady grace and strength, the courage against what had happened, the way that he had held me when I left and when I came back. It would not form: the world would be changed without him, a different one with a hole ripped in it. I started to shake.

Hands wrapped around my shoulders, and the nurse squeezed just enough for me to look up from the floor and back to her. I hadn’t realised that my mind and eyes had slipped away. Her brow was furrowed, and I saw her in such detail that I could hardly take it in. The world had too much in it. I tried to pull away with some sort of sound, but she held on.

“-sorry, I’m sorry,” she was saying. “I mean, they’ve found him. They had a lot of people to work through, but they’ve found him. They’re bringing him here. Now.”

Which words were real? Identified. Found. Was I just hearing what I wanted to hear? There might have been a time that I did not care, happy just to hear the words at all. But I wanted them to be true, to be real, to keep existing.

I took hold of the nurse’s wrists, and could faintly feel her pulse beneath my fingers. Grandmother, Mother... Baba. It had to be true.

“Where is he?” I said.

“He’s on his way. There are a group of them that have been found that have family here, they-”

I knew that there were other people, but I didn’t care. If they had family here, then their family would care, and they could be together. I just wanted my father back, safe, wanted to know that there was something I had not broken.

I stood up, pushing the nurse out of my way. The strength hurt, but it was like a close memory, fitting to me. She was saying something, trying to restrain me, first by the arm, then calling out for assistance, but my body stumbled to my control and easily pushed her aside.

My room opened on to a corridor, a line of identical doors with numbers on little white plaques. There was a bathroom a few doors down, but I hadn’t wanted to go any further than that before. Now I wanted out. I wanted to be with my father.

Not lost. I couldn’t get lost, or I wouldn’t find him. I had to close my eyes and breathe deeply, reminding myself with each one that they air smelt clean and fine and not at all of salt. When the nurse’s hand brushed against my arm again I stepped away, but put my hands up quickly.

“Please,” I said. I had used that word so many times that it had almost lost meaning, but I found some for it again now. “Please, take me to meet him.”

Running would not have worked, but asking did. The nurse - Anita, she said - found me a coat and some slippers, took me to the elevators, and remained quiet for most of the time. I could not have handled more words.

“They’re using one of the emergency exits,” she said as we reached the bottom floor. I just nodded.

The fear was creeping back by then. I knew what they had done to me, knew too well. I knew what they had done to my mother. If they had done anything to my father, if he knew what it was to feel the fists in his belly or the needles in his hands or-

Jittering pain ran up my arms, and I stumbled against the wall of the elevator. Metal on my shoulder and cheek; I jerked away as light flashed across my eyes and pain lanced across the side of my face, pulling me down into the dark, the fire on my bones.

“Mulan.” A cool hand rested against my forehead. My eyes were open, but all that I could see was blackness. “Mulan, come back to me. You’re safe. Come on.”

Gradually my vision wheeled out again, and I realised that Anita was still beside me, looking at me with concerned eyes. My cheek still burned; no, that was not the shocks, that had been the rain, that terrible rain, and it took every scrap of me to remember that both of those things had passed. I concentrated instead on the hand on my forehead, until I could slowly nod without it just looking like a shudder, and allowed myself to be led out of the elevator and into the corridor.

The air was clearer here, easier to breathe. Anita coaxed me along one corridor, then another, through to a quieter part of the hospital where the sounds of footsteps and voices faded away. “It’s busy here,” I said.

“Yes, with everything that’s been happening. Some of the fighting in District Two has been pretty bad... there’s talk of another offer of surrender in the next day or two. Hopefully that will bring an end to it all, and we can work on the peace.”

There was something wistful in her words. “Did you know about the rebellion?” My voice cracked as we turned one last corner and came to what looked like a loading bay, with a pair of wide-open doors and a handful of people in hospital scrubs standing waiting. There were no other people who looked like patients.

It took a while for Anita to reply. “My husband was involved. He used to... drop hints. But I never really knew all that much. Just that there was a strong feeling against the Capitol. When it started, I was surprised... but not shocked.”

I had distant memories of screaming at Captain Chernabog that the Capitol should not have been surprised that there was a rebellion at all. Perhaps I had even been right.

One of the Capitol cars had been requisitioned to bring the people back. When it arrived, I immediately stood up straighter, heart pounding in my chest, and had to clasp my hands together to stop them from shaking. The other hospital workers stepped forwards to help out the people inside, one at a time: an old woman with mottled bruises on her face and her hair shorn; a young woman, little more than a girl, with her arm strapped to her chest; a man who looked unharmed, but with a vacant look in his eyes; and my father.

He looked the same. At least, I knew him at a glance, did not even have to pause. I tried to walk quickly towards him, but my legs struggled beneath me and I might have staggered once or twice.

“Baba.” My voice was quiet; he didn’t look up. “Baba!”

My father’s head jerked up, looking around in that wary way that he usually did after a nightmare. The cane in his hand was some white plastic thing, not his wooden one. Then I was right in front of him, reaching out my arms, but he looked at me blankly, no recognition in his eyes.

No. Please, no, let him not have been taken by the Capitol, let him not...

“Ping?”

I stepped in and threw my arms around him, a sob pulsing through me. One of his arms wrapped around me in return, and for a long moment it didn’t even matter that he had called me by my brother’s name. We had answered to each for years, after all. Then the guilt, and the pain, stabbed into me, because whatever happened I would only be one of his children, and could not bring the other back.

“It’s me, Baba,” I replied. My voice was still trembling, all over the place, but I swallowed and held on to him more tightly. “It’s just me.”

“Mulan.”

His cane clattered to the ground as his other arm wrapped tightly around me, and I felt more of his weight. It didn’t matter, though. For the first time since the end of the Hunger Games, I felt tears running down my face as I cried, and held my father close, and finally dared to hope that the world might be right again.

Kida found me sitting outside the hospital room, to give my parents some privacy for their reunion. I would not have looked up from the feet in front of me were it not for the deep brown of the skin that showed between the shoes and the too-short pants, reminding me of her. She said my name just as I realised, and I straightened up in my chair and found my frown fading. Though her arm was in a sling and she seemed to have traded a fuller shirt for the blue tube top that she had been wearing in training, she was smiling, her eyes bright.

“What happened?” I said.

“District Two is ours,” she replied. There was a flush in her cheeks. “The last stronghold is gone; we feared it would be a siege, but some of the residents remembered tunnels that had been collapsed, and used them to reach the water supply and shut it down. When they realised what had happened, most of them surrendered, and handed over their weapons to us when they came out.”

Before I could say anything, she continued, slightly breathlessly.

“Yensid is dead. Perhaps it is better this way; he would have wanted a very public execution, and now he will not have one. The former head of his military, General Michael Mausel, agreed to make the announcement to any other groups of resistance, because they will believe him but not us. It is finally over.”

“I meant...” I waved at her arm, her missing shirt. Looking with fresher eyes, I could see now that there were faint, slightly pinkish scars all over her right shoulder as well.

Kida actually looked at her arm before giving a one-shouldered shrug. “A stray bullet glanced me. Most of them surrendered, but not all. It is not serious, it just needs to be properly cleaned. Some of those who surrendered were hit worse; there was fighting inside, it seems.”

“Congratulations.” I meant the word, but it was difficult to find enough emotion to put into it to feel right for all that I knew it meant. Yensid was dead, Panem was free from him for the first time in over seventy-four years, and all that I wanted to do was curl up in my bed and wait for Ping to come back and make my family complete again.

She extended out her hand to me, and at first I just stared at it dumbly before realising that she meant for me to take it. Rather than pull me up, Kida just squeezed. “We’re free, Mulan,” she said. I hadn’t noticed before how her accent changed the shape of my name, but it didn’t stop it from being mine. “Now we can start fixing things.”

District One was relatively intact. The rebellion here had taken the form of officials taking over and directing things back into the hands of the people, rather than riots and bombing. I was relieved. One or two of the victors, who had supported the Capitol, were gone, but there were fewer casualties than I had heard of from elsewhere. I supposed that we were lucky.

Victor’s Village was full of ghosts, but there was nowhere else for us to go. I gave my house to the family of someone who had died during the rebellion, moved back into my father’s instead, and wondered where things were supposed to go.

Some of the other Districts needed rebuilding work, but I was too weak to volunteer for that. Experts from various fields were moving around, and there was talk of arranging it so that normal citizens could as well. My father was a part of that. There was talk, as well, of starting up the farms again, and my grandmother and Master He and all of the older generation whose parents and grandparents had farmed were being asked what they remembered about that. I was just a victor, a child who had killed other children to survive, and there was nothing for me to do.

I stayed in my room for a while, trying to persuade myself that the flickering pains in my arms were not really there, before the confinement of one room became too much all over again. The garden was better, and I looked at the flowers that had been dying leaves when I had last seen them. Pink-white peach flowers were opening above me.

“Mulan.” My father’s voice made me startle, reaching for a knife that wasn’t there, before I caught myself. He joined me in the shrine, and gestured for us to sit down. “I’m sorry that this didn’t start earlier. We had to wait for the right time.”

I had suspected that he had known, but it had never been made clear. For some reason, that thought shook me, but I shifted closer to him on the bench. “Well, it’s happened now. That’s the important thing.”

His hand came to rest on my shoulder, and it felt like I was young again, with a touch of the hand giving more praise than words ever could. I held on to the words, turning them over in my mind. It had happened. We were free. I had lived long enough to see the rebellion - well, I supposed that it should be called a revolution now.

“They’re looking for Ping,” he added, and my brother’s name made a lump rise in my throat. “There are still Capitol facilities to be checked. But if he is there, they will find him.”

There was hope in his voice, but I did not know exactly how these places worked, or how many of them there were. I didn’t know whether Ping had been sent to the sort of place that I had been, or where my parents had been held, or where the girl who had been given my name had come from. I hoped that they had been able to send her back to her family, if she had one left, and give her back her self. That, at least, the Capitol had not ripped from me.

“There is a saying that my mother taught me, and that her father taught her.” I hoped that it was not one of my grandmother’s more colourful sayings. “Even the ordinary people can raise or fell a country. No matter how hard things seem, we will make things right.”

I leant my head into his shoulder and allowed myself to cry again, the tears soothing in eyes that had felt too dry for too long. For a while we sat there, but this time it did not matter how long it was; now we were free, and we had as long as was needed to make things right again.