Canon Divergence: Chapter 12

[lorata]

also on AO3 here

A long time coming...



They’ve been fighting all night.

Devon trained for eleven years to win the Hunger Games. He killed five people in training and seven in the Arena and it took him a year of recovery to work past the phantom blood on his hands and the faces in his dreams. A few hours into the assault on the Capitol and he left those numbers far behind, though at least he didn’t have to kiss them first.

This is nothing like the Arena.

It’s chaos: people running, shouting, explosions and chunks of building flying everywhere, right away the scale is so much bigger, like those first frenzied moments at the Cornucopia magnified and stretched to last a whole day. In the Arena it’s also focused, contained, every aspect is controlled and every variable accounted for by Gamemakers, mentors, savvy tributes, and there’s one clear objective. In the Arena all players have the same goal: survive, whatever the cost, and anything else that breathes is a target, no questions asked.

Here, the sound of gunfire drives civilians shrieking into the streets despite the clear orders from all sides to stay inside; here they have two tiers of enemies, people to take alive and people to shoot on sight. Here the concept of ‘ally’ doesn’t mean ‘someone you agree not to kill for now’, here there are consequences for killing the wrong person. Here there are consequences, period; there is no carte blanche understanding that all actions are forgiven for who ever makes it out. Here you fight alongside friends and try to remember in the heat of the fight when your brain screams kill kill kill survive which uniforms mean shoot and which mean stop and every second of hesitation could mean someone dead who shouldn’t be or someone got away who’s meant to die.

Like the rest of the Twos, Devon and the others got only a handful of training and that’s it. Unlike civilians, no one had to prep them for the possibility of taking lives, and they already know basic tactics and how to take orders. Hand them a rifle, show them how to assemble and reload, practice a few rounds to get the aim right. They’re used to picking up new skills, and the three of them got their firearms rating the same afternoon and that was that. Their orders now are to keep the ground squads occupied and away from the presidential mansion long enough that Lyme’s team can carry out her mission, and hopefully not martyr themselves in the meantime.

A soldier darts out from behind a barricade; the flash of a streetlight on a scope draws Devon’s attention before he really tracks the movement, and he knocks Emory out of the way to fire. The soldier drops, bleeding onto the concrete. Emory whirls on him, sharp and savage, every trace of the humble-proud quarry girl who brought him cookies vanished. “We are not competing,” she reprimands him. Her blonde hair shines black in the orange light, stained from the blood of a man she killed point-blank range when they turned a corner. “If one of us has a clean shot, we let them take it. No scores, remember?”

“Sorry.” Devon swallows acid and scrubs a hand over his face. “I - teamwork, not used to it.”

“Get used to it,” Emory said, giving him a hard look. “This is war.”

Emory had deferred to the boys in her Arena, rather than jockeying for pack leader with too many strong personalities in play. Now as Devon follows her without hesitation, he can’t help but see an alternate past for her in this hard-edged, matter-of-fact soldier she never got to use. On his other side, Misha holds her rifle in her left hand and reaches over to grip Devon’s neck, fingers sliding in the grime and sweat. They’re a Career Pack spread out across a decade, fighting a battle they never thought they’d join that has no victory trumpets waiting at the end.

Movement to the side - Misha whirls, raises her weapon - but no, that’s a grey uniform, the sunrise crest on the sleeve, and Devon hisses a breath. “Friendly!” he yells, and Misha curses and yanks her arm to the side. The shot goes wide, the bullet sending flecks of concrete flying as it embeds in the corner of a building. The rebel soldier disappears into a side alley.

“Fuck,” Misha mutters. “Fuck!”

“Hey,” Emory says, harsh but comforting all at once, and Misha’s shoulders drop. “Focus. You’ve got this.”

“We shouldn’t be here,” Misha says, voice skittering sideways, not quite into recovery-dissociating territory but close. Devon winces; they do not have time for this, not with bullets flying and the city on fire, and worse, he’s only as sane as the rest of them - if Misha goes, so will he. “This whole plan sounded like a good idea at the time, everyone knows I’m not afraid of anything, but that was when I only had to worry about me. Now there’s you, and Lyme, and Callista, and can’t lose any of you -”

“Hey!” Emory says again. She gestures to Devon, who covers them while she grabs Misha and pulls her close, gripping her face with her free hand and pressing their foreheads together. Misha was always a little bit in love with Emory, Devon knows that, and right now he is one hundred percent fine with it if Emory can use it to bring his girl back. “There won’t be anybody unless we win this, so stay with me. You were always fearless. Now you gotta be brave, that’s all. Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Misha sucks in a breath and closes her eyes, and when she opens them again her gaze is hard. “I’m fine. Got it.” She rubs her eyes with the back of her wrist, but Devon isn’t going to judge. He’s been tasting bile all night. “Don’t tell Lyme.”

Emory claps the side of her face. “Nothing to tell except good things,” she says, and the best part about Emory is that Devon knows she means it. “Let’s keep going.”

Misha nods, shouldering her rifle, and Emory looks back down at the tracker device she carries as their de facto squad commander. “Section looks clear,” she says as the screen comes up empty, both of traps and of any blips from the trackers in Peacekeeper-issue rifles, though that’s not always reliable. Some of the Peacekeeper units started pulling theirs out after a few too many successful ambushes. “Keep an eye out.”

They head out but Devon’s throat squeezes. He can’t explain it but it’s there, lurking around corners and pressing on his back. “I have a bad feeling.”

“This whole place is a bad feeling,” Emory says, not turning. “Keep your head on, I promised our mentors you’d both walk out of here with me and you will.”

“Yeah, I am, I just -”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Misha says, her words almost a snarl. “I hear a just-in-case-we-die speech brewing if we’d ever heard one.” She turns to glare at him. “Try it and I’ll knock you unconscious and drag you through the streets myself.”

“She’s right.” Emory gives Devon a long look. “We didn’t do goodbyes with our mentors and we’re not doing it now. We’ll get through this, as long as you don’t lose your mind on me. I really don’t want to have to explain to Brutus that you went full third-week Arena on the battlefield. Okay?”

The feeling doesn’t leave; it creeps along behind him, skulking at the edges of his vision like the shivering insanity that stalked him in the Arena, always a step or two behind. But Devon beat it then and he’ll beat it now, and he only has to do this for a day. A day filled with far more death and danger than anything his Arena ever offered him, but it beats three weeks of slow starvation and exposure and constant hypervigilance. He can do this. “I’m fine,” he says, gripping his rifle and wishing, not for the first time, that he had a good, honest polearm instead.

They move through the streets, Emory with one eye on the scanner, Misha and Devon on either side keeping watch. “Squad ahead,” Emory says finally as they cross over into a new red zone. “Too big for us to take on our own, but it’ll take too long to go around and we’ll hit a bigger one on the detour anyway.” She turns to Devon, gives him a friendly shake on the shoulder. “Your turn, brown eyes. Give ‘em all you’ve got.”

Devon heaves in a breath and forces it out. It’s worked before: more than one squad of formerly-loyalist Peacekeepers now wear fight for the rebels because Devon convinced them to turn, but how much luck can he possibly have? Except there’s really only one answer to that question. “Misha, you got my back?” She’s the best fighter of all of them, and she’s his girl and there’s no one he’d rather have protecting him.

“Always,” she says, and there are no goodbyes or mushy speeches but she does pull him in for a hard kiss. Then she slips away, heaves herself up onto a broken balcony and flattens herself against the metal, disappearing into the shadows.

“If they don’t go for it, we won’t have much time, but try to run,” Emory says in a low voice as they sidestep a pile of rubble. “Never mind cowardice.”

“I’ll run if you run,” Devon shoots back. His win might have been low on kills with clean merciful deaths, but nobody spent twenty years hounding him with the shadow of a default win. Of the two of them, he’s not the one more likely to do something stupid out of the desire to prove themselves.

Emory shoots him a look, unreadable in the darkness, but then she snorts. “Fine,” she mutters, then raises her voice. “District 2 Victors, hold your fire!”

Odds are, a squad that size will have at least a few Two ex-Careers in it. “Bullshit,” one of them yells back, an ha, Devon recognizes the twist of the last of a quarry accent, long suppressed but returning under stress. “Traitors burned the Village to the ground!”

“A ploy to get us out safe,” Devon calls out, because that’s better than trying to explain the long version. “It’s V52 and 60, and we’re armed but we aren’t shooting for the next two minutes. Can you give us two minutes?”

A pause, incongruous in the middle of all the death and gunfire, then the voice says, “Two minutes.”

Devon steps clear of the barrier and finds a halo of a street lamp, hands raised, Emory joining him at his side. A handful of Peacekeepers stand, wary with their weapons ready, and come forward into the light. Most of them have their helmets on, but a few have lost theirs, and the rest flip their visors up. “So,” says the young man in the middle, brown-haired and freckled, face twisted with idealism turned sour. “Alive and traitors. I think I liked you better dead.”

Emory says nothing as Devon searches his memory, rifling through the cards in his mental library with frantic urgency because he knows this, everything depends on him - “Tom,” he says finally, pushing back the gasping relief. “I haven’t seen you since … 65? 66? How’s your mother?”

The young man - in his twenties now, but just a kid when Devon saw him last, twelve years old with a pen and paper thrust in his face for an autograph - flinches back. “Don’t,” warns another, likely his commanding officer. “It’s a trick.”

“It’s not a trick,” Devon says, making his voice calm, soothing. He kissed a boy and slit his throat with this voice, but today maybe he can save some lives. “I came to your school for a recruitment drive. You were in the Program, about to take your Residential exam, but you weren’t sure you wanted to be a Volunteer. You said you didn’t know if you could kill a tribute. Do you remember what I told you?”

Tom’s hands tighten on his weapon. His throat bobs. “You told me I could always be a Peacekeeper. You told me anyone I killed, I’d know they deserved it.”

“That’s right.” Devon wants to wet his lips - his whole mouth, his throat, feels dry as fire - but he can’t show hesitation, not now. He keeps his hands raised. “I meant what I said. I thought I understood, but I was wrong. We were all wrong. Nobody here deserves to die. It’s all a big mess.”

Beside him, Emory takes slow, measured breaths. Devon’s head spikes with pain, as though an invisible opponent is driving a dagger through his eye socket so it comes out the back of his skull. “Listen to me,” he continues. “We don’t want to tear anything down. We want to build. You have to know this isn’t right, none of this is. People are dying, too many people. There won’t be anyone left if this keeps up. We need to stop fighting and fix the country that all of us loved so much we were willing to die for.”

The commanding officer steps forward, eyes narrowed, and pulls off her helmet. Devon’s heart hammers. If the commander falls, the squad will follow; he sees the way they look at her, fear and anticipation and adoration. No one reaches for their weapons, fingers itching for the trigger. They won’t shoot her if she turns. She turns to Devon, stares at him with her chin raised. “You got lucky once. Can you do it again?”

Shit. She’s older, this one, which makes it harder, more distance between his memory and the person in front of him. Devon’s brain spins and spins and spins before he finds it. “Sarah,” he says, sagging with relief even as he holds himself perfectly steady on the outside. Her eyes snap wide. All those hours and hours of logging every interaction, civilian and ex-Career alike, worth every late night and migraine. “You didn’t want to leave your sister. You were worried what would happen to her if you volunteered and didn’t walk out.”

“Fuck,” Sarah mutters. Whispering spreads through the rest of her squad.

“This is what I’m talking about,” Devon says, taking a step forward. One or two fingers tighten but nobody brings their weapons to bear. “I know you. I am you. It doesn’t have to be like this. All of us - Victors, Peacekeepers - we did what we did because we love this country. I’m here now, on the other side, for the same reason. I’m not asking you to surrender. I’m asking you to join me. Make things right.”

Nobody moves, and so Devon risks it: he lifts his foot for one more step. “Wait, don’t!” Tom shouts, anguished. Devon stumbles, but it’s too late - he already committed, and he tries to change his stride midair but the ground is unsteady, debris and wreckage strewn everywhere, and his boot drops on the only clear patch of ground.

A pause - a click - and then - an earthquake.

No. Earthquakes don’t bite, don’t have jaws that snap over his legs and clamp down on his thighs and tear through bone. Earthquakes don’t fling him through the air and slam him into the wall. Then it’s over and it doesn’t matter what it was, now there’s fire and pain and blood and ringing in his ears, blood on his fingers where he touches his face, blood in his vision and blood on the ground.

And then - silence. Silence and ringing at the same time, roaring and deafening, and nausea, the smell of dust and smoke and vomit. The churn and crumple of his own stomach as he heaves - his vomit, he’s vomiting - and blood, even more blood, more blood than he’s ever seen outside the Arena. Everything spins. There’s a blanket on the ground, a black blanket, black and rippling in the streetlights, covering his legs and shimmying down onto the concrete.

Silence and ringing and blood and spinning and Emory, crumpled and pale and lying on the street. She’s not moving, why isn’t he moving, he should help her. He tries to stand, to throw himself onto his side to get to her but it’s not working, his legs aren’t listening - why aren’t they listening - and that’s not a blanket, it’s not a blanket at all, it’s -

- black.

Artemisia vaults the balcony and hits the ground as the explosion settles, the years of training that drilled her never to jump with an unsheathed sword reminding her to sling her rifle over her back. Her knees jar from the impact - sloppy, didn’t bend enough - but she barely notices, not like it matters when Devon is a mess of blood and bone and bits of tissue everywhere, mouth open and gaping like a fish. The growing pool of blood on the pavement draws Artemisia’s gaze down his torso, where -

(Here’s a riddle, what do you call a leg when it’s not a leg, what do you call a leg when it’s blown off to the knee and there’s bits on the ground and stuck to the wall, what do you call a leg when it’s nothing but gristle and muscle and peeling skin and blood, so much blood)

Emory lies on the ground nearby, skin pale and clammy in the weak orange lamplight, eyes blank and rolled back into her head. She’s splashed with blood but it’s wrong, it’s on her clothes soaking in towards her skin and not the other way around because that’s Devon’s blood, not hers. The only blood that’s her own is a trickle from her nose and the corner of her mouth, and that would be a good thing except for the huge dent in the side of her skull, and no, oh no, no no no no -

(Prioritize. Mentors prioritize. Devon is bleeding out fast but he’s still here, still holding on, eyes clear and hands scrabbling at the ground. Emory is gone, blank-faced and empty-gazed and gone, not yet but she will be soon, Artemisia has seen this one too many times from the mentor seat. And this is what mentors do, they choose, one lives and one dies, no two tributes ever walk out alive, Misha you have to choose -)

Artemisia rips off her jacket and ties it around the stump of Devon’s left leg, the grey material soaked black-red in seconds. No, no he won’t die like this, not here, but there are no Gamemakers and no sponsors floating above her with bandages and shock treatment waiting with their fingers hovering over a button. She puts all her weight across his thighs, slippery and hot and sickening, and her brain helpfully supplies a memory of Six boy’s guts tumbling, pale pink and grey and brown and red, sliding out over the ground.

The squad of Peacekeepers who let Devon step on a fucking landmine (no wonder they were so calm about letting a pair of armed Victors stroll right up to them) stare at them from behind their barrier, frozen, and for an awful second Artemisia thinks they’re going to stand there and watch.

A scream builds up inside her - she’s not Devon or Emory, she has no inspiring words of hope and unity that will convince them to rally together and join her - but then the commander curses. She grabs a pack from their pile of supplies and vaults across the barricade. “He’ll probably die anyway,” she says, matter of fact, and in that second she has no idea how close she is to Artemisia pulling an Enobaria and ripping out her throat. Except that to kill the Peacekeeper she would have to let go of Devon, and if she lets go he really is dead. “But we’ll do what we can.”

“There’s a hospital,” adds one of them, as he pulls out a pressure-sealing bandage and slaps it onto the mess. “It’s skeleton-staffed after the evacuation. We’re keeping it open for our people, but -”

“He fucking is your people,” Artemisia grits out through clenched teeth. “That was his whole point.”

They work in grim-faced silence, and the bandages keep coming and the blood keeps pumping, but finally a bit of white cloth stays, and then some more. Artemisia can barely breathe or see; all she knows is Devon’s hands in hers, fingers nearly slipping through her grip.

“Misha …” Devon’s mouth is dark and wet and red, and she turns to glare at him.

“Whatever you’re going to say, fuck you,” Artemisia snaps. He laughs, rattling and horrible, and drops his head back down onto her lap, but he’s still here. Still here.

“This isn’t … I signed up to protect people, not fight a war,” mutters one of the others to a comrade. “How many people have we killed by now? And not - nobody said we’d have to kill Devon. He - he sent my dad a get well card when he got out of surgery, and I only met him one time. I don’t even remember mentioning my dad, but I must’ve. This isn’t why I took the oath.”

“You asshole,” Artemisia says in a low voice, leaning down and resting her forehead against Devon’s. “If it were me, they probably would’ve let me bleed. Lucky for us our whole district is in love with you.”

“Emory -” Devon chokes, coughs, and Artemisia turns his head so he can spew blood and saliva onto her lap and try again. “Emory, she’s - she’s -”

“No cannon yet,” Artemisia says out of habit, then hisses and closes her eyes. Fuck. Fuck!

“Still alive,” calls out one of the Peacekeepers. They haven’t moved her except to turn her on her side, gingerly. He crouches next to her, two fingers pressed with incongruous gentleness to the underside of her jaw. “For now. If V60 is stable we need to move them right away.”

They turn to the squad commander, kneeling at Devon’s side, arms bloodied to the elbows. She’s the oldest of them but still young: younger than Lyme, maybe even younger than Artemisia herself. “Let’s do it,” she says. “The faster we get them to medical the sooner we can join the fight.” She meets Artemisia’s gaze, holds it for several seconds. “Consider us convinced.”

“Misha -!” Devon’s words peel off into a scream as they lift him, and oh fuck she’s crying and can’t stop crying, maybe she’ll never stop crying ever again. He grips her arm until his fingers leave crescent marks against her skin. “Go,” he gasps. “Fight.”

“I’m not leaving you!”

“Go,” Devon insists, eyes glassy. “No trumpets means …”

“… we haven’t won,” Artemisia finishes, and she hisses out a breath. “Okay, fine, but I need weapons.” A few of the Peacekeepers pass her over new guns, a medpack, even a short knife, and Artemisia straps everything on and stows the extra clip at her waist. It’s stupid, but the knife settles her, brings her back a little more to herself. “I’m going to burn this place to the ground for you,” she tells him, and kisses him.

She kneels down next to Emory - still unmoving, eyes still open, vacant - and does the same to her. And now Artemisia is alone, returning to the war zone without backup, but if the last taste in her mouth is blood and salt and dirt, so be it. They were born in blood and if they die in blood it will not - it will not - be in vain.

Artemisia picks up Emory’s scanner, cracked but functioning, and stalks deeper into the red zone.

It’s easier now, in a way. No friends, no distractions, no qualms. Only Artemisia, her weapons, and the streets. She turns a Peacekeeping squad: not with her faith and conviction, but with her rage. She kills another pair when they refuse. She murders an entire cohort of Coin’s people when they recognize her and reach for their comms because they can’t know the Victors are here, not yet; she fires into a nearby trap trigger and lets the city take them. She swallows the guilt, letting Devon’s mangled body and Emory’s unseeing eyes spur her forward. She repeats the Victor’s promise even as she laughs at its hollowness: this will all be worth it when you win.

Artemisia will say one thing for Peacekeepers: the stim shots they packed in their medkits carry one hell of a punch, as good as anything the best sponsor funds could ever buy. When the anger burns off and exhaustion bleeds through she jams herself with a cocktail of Snow only knows what, and the shock of it snaps her eyes wide and pushes a spring into her step, holy shit. All of the kick of Callista’s special drugs and none of the sparkle, and Artemisia picks up the pace with renewed vigour.

The drugs even make her forget the pain from the stray bullet and sprays of shrapnel she’s taken, which on one hand is stupid - pain is a useful signal, it tells a smart person where their limits are - but on the other, she doesn’t have time for smart, not now, and what she needs is a clear head. Artemisia takes a minute to rest in the cover of an abandoned frippery store (candles for pets, according to the signs, specially designed to calm and soothe, with flames that won’t singe the fur of any animal bred through their subsidiary company) when an alert comes through her radio.

Artemisia’s heart leaps at the sound of Lyme’s voice: still alive, at least for now, if still tense and clipped. They’ve taken the mansion and captured Snow, but can’t risk making an announcement until they have him safely secured. Combat victors and support units have their next assignment: move to the rendezvous point and wait for the signal for the second phase.

The rendezvous point is far from Artemisia’s position, but when she checks her scanner, her path would take her mostly through cleared zones. For the first time since leaving Devon and Emory behind, Artemisia hesitates. She could pretend she didn’t understand the order; pretend she’s otherwise engaged, or that she lost her radio and didn’t get the message, or that she’s in the middle of a hot zone and couldn’t get there safely. She could do a dozen things that aren’t head back to the rendezvous where Lyme and Brutus will be waiting, ready to ask her why she’s there alone.

For a minute Artemisia almost does it. She could go back to the hospital and wait there, get confirmation that they’re all right (or not), sit out the rest of the fight at their bedsides and radio in once it’s all over. Better than showing up with dubious information, having to tell their mentors that the last she saw of them they were unconscious or screaming and bleeding onto the streets -

Artemisia looks back over her shoulder at the path to the hospital, then turns away. “This is all you, Devon,” she says aloud, glaring at the sky as she heads out in the direction of the rendezvous. “I’m only doing this because I know your stupid face would be disappointed if I went back now.”

No points for acting there, but there are no cameras and no trainers scoring her mistakes, so it hardly matters. Artemisia wraps herself in the memory of Lyme’s voice, alive and strong, and fades into the alley.

Throughout her younger years, Lyme had a whole speech planned out for the day she faced Coriolanus Snow one-on-one and lay her blade edge-on across his throat. She wrote and revised endless versions of it on nights when sleep eluded her, perfecting each barb and savage turn of phrase until the country’s best propo teams could not hope to improve on it. Her words would leave him defensive, angered, humbled, and finally, once he looked her in the eye, afraid.

By the time Lyme’s team breaches the president’s door, she’s seen good people die, soldiers and children all along the spectrum of guilt and culpability. She’s stood in the middle of a country tearing itself apart and realized that its problems lay far deeper than one man with poison ulcers and breath that stank of blood. The satisfaction she’d imagined at the thought of driving her blade into his neck lies long out of reach, buried somewhere with the thousands of dead civilians and Cato’s chewed-up corpse and the looming shadow of the coming winter.

In the end, Lyme lets the others make the actual capture, while she stands at the door and holds position against any last-minute attacks. None come, and all too fast it’s over, her soldiers cheering and back-slapping as President Snow kneels with three weapons pointed at his head. Lyme turns away and announces their success into the comms, waits for Rigel’s acknowledgement, feels a cold foreboding when instead Marius answers her in a carefully modulated, professional tone.

But for now, they have to get President Snow secure. As soon as anyone realizes what happened, every loyal Peacekeeper will be headed in their direction. So would Coin’s people, once her teams report in and it’s clear that the capture didn’t occur under her command. Phase II needs to happen now, and they don’t have time. “Get him quiet and ready to go,” Lyme says to her second, who nods and heads back in to relay the order.

Outside she finds Marius and the others in a huddle. Claudius jogs up to her, a little bloodied and wide-eyed but alive, and he presses his hand to the inside of her elbow in warning before her brain notes the one who’s missing. Lyme locks gazes with Marius, who shakes his head, and Lyme lets out a breath. She didn’t know them, didn’t make friends with them like Brutus, and she can’t make herself feel anything for one more death, not today. Not yet.

Besides, Lyme knows those faces. Marius is a seasoned officer and he’ll keep it together as long as he needs to, but Selene’s face is a rictus of fury, and Dash has one hand on her arm but he’s not all there, his eyes faraway and his face pale. They can’t stop now. Any acknowledgement, any sympathy, and it will all fall apart. “We need to move to Phase II,” Lyme says. “Bring all the Victors together to the rendezvous point so we’re ready to go by dawn. I need a team to go in, make sure the area is clear of any surface-to-air bombardment, any last traps. We need a clean sweep. Can your group handle this?”

Marius glances at his kids. Dash exhales once but then he nods, and Selene meets Lyme’s gaze with savage intensity. “Good,” Lyme says. “Claudius, go with them.”

“Yes, boss,” he says, but as she turns to go he follows her, twitching. “Brutus is - he didn’t want to leave him there, Rigel I mean. So he and some of the others decided to do some corpse cleanup before we head out.”

Lyme stares at Claudius as though that will make different words fall out of his mouth, but he only shrugs at her, helpless. “Of all the - you know what, I don’t care,” she says, clenching her fists to stop from flinging up her hands. “I don’t have time for this. As long as he’s at the rendezvous, let him do what he wants.”

She relays the Phase II command through to the Victor comms, then thumbs the frequency over to the combat teams. “Phase I complete,” Lyme announces, pausing for the short exclamations of satisfaction. Most of them are fighting and don’t have time for anything more. “Phase II is in preparation. Make the switch.”

With President Snow in custody, the non-Victor ground teams would now switch to distraction and discombobulation, working to disrupt both sides and take out as many fighting groups without casualties as possible. Bringing down buildings, obstructing roadways, whatever it took to block off sections of the city and keep the Capitol-loyal Peacekeepers and Coin’s soldiers away from each other. How much of an effect it would have overall Lyme couldn’t tell, but after so many hours of bloodshed, any reduction in casualties would feel like a victory, and if nothing else the added chaos would allow them to get the president underground without notice from either side.

With Lyme's second now in charge of the team getting President Snow away, and Claudius with Marius and his squad making safe the rendezvous site, Lyme has a moment to herself. The immediate burden of command has temporarily lifted, and she takes a few deep breaths and rakes her hands through her hair. As the rush of adrenaline fades, she thinks of Brutus, stubbornly taking care of the bodies in the courtyard.

Lyme rolls her eyes to the ceiling, mutters an oath under her breath, and heads downstairs. She finds him laying out the corpses - rebels and Peacekeepers alike - along the garden path, using a downed trellis as a makeshift bier. "Brutus," Lyme says when he doesn't look up. "We have to go." He ignores her. "For fuck's sake -"

“He turned for me,” Brutus says. He doesn’t shout it, doesn’t raise his voice at all. Lyme almost wishes he had. “Would’ve turned one day anyhow, he was a good man, but fact is, he turned because of me. And now he’s dead for it.”

An ugly thought pops into Lyme’s head: a whole lot more people have died for her, and for far more hopeless causes than this one, but she’s still standing. She knows better than to say it, recognizes the weeks of hypervigilance and grief and lack of sleep that drove her to think it in the first place. Instead she says, “You know what you’d tell me, in your place.”

Brutus goes still, one hand splayed over Rigel’s eyes. “Don’t.”

Lyme crosses her arms over her chest, plants her feet and lifts her chin. “He already died for you. You gonna make it pointless, too?”

“You son of a bitch,” Brutus says, the words completely without heat. “I’m just so Games-damned tired.”

Lyme drops the posturing, crosses the courtyard and rests her hand on his shoulder. “We’re almost there,” she says. “A little more and we’re done. Then you can take your kids back home, buy a microbrewery and officially retire.”

Brutus snorts. “Yeah,” he says, bracing both hands on his knees and pushing himself to his feet. “Yeah, sure, why the hell not.”

They don’t talk as they make their way through the city. Lyme takes point, leading them away from the worst of the fighting, and Brutus follows her without any of the customary jockeying that made up their dynamic prior to the war. Part of her wonders if they’ll ever find it again, or if all this death means an end to the hypermasculine bullshit rituals they constructed between themselves so they could have feelings without either of them noticing.

One by one the Victor teams check in as they reach the rendezvous and find a hiding spot until go-time. Lyme breathes a sigh of relief when Misha announces her arrival, then forcibly clears her mind rather than keeping a running tally of the others. She’ll find out when she gets there, and if she keeps worrying about everyone else she’ll scrape herself ragged long before they ever get to the checkpoint.

The light has turned pale, the cool, desaturated grey of pre-dawn favoured by the Gamemakers and artificially extended during twilight hours, when Lyme and Brutus approach the edge of the perimeter from the roof of one of the nearby buildings. Lyme holds up a hand and they fall back, Brutus a solid presence at her side as they crouch and peer over the edge. “Looks like we’re late to the party,” Brutus says in an undertone.

The rendezvous point is a large park outside the centre of the city, with a wide expanse of grass, an amphitheatre with a stage and a giant screen, where a number of Capitol civilians have set up a temporary shelter and rest area for anyone who missed - or ignored - the evacuation. Unsurprisingly, this number is extensive, and it didn’t take much for Lyme’s scouts to herd the fleeing Capitol refugees toward it, and encourage any they saw during the chaos to head in that direction. Now, the park and surrounding streets mill with brightly-coloured citizens, unknowingly protected by a handful rebel soldiers now growing by the hour.

“We should get down there,” Lyme says. The sun will be rising soon, and the crucial check-ins came through her earpiece a while ago. Everything is in place, and while Lyme could sit this one out and it wouldn’t actually affect the mission, this one will be personally satisfying to see through to the end.

Brutus takes another minute to look out over the crowd. “You think she can pull it off?”

The million-dollar question. “She’s a Victor,” Lyme says, noncommittal.

Brutus scowls. “She’s a kid.”

“And I’m tired,” Lyme says. She should have a better answer for him; they’ve come this far, and she’s given speeches and rallied soldier after soldier to fight against impossible odds but right now she digs and finds nothing but dust. She thinks of her Arena, that long slog near the end where the hours melted together into sun and sweat and sand and thirst, where nothing mattered but survival and glory seemed a bitter, half-hysterical joke. “I killed a bunch of kids twenty years ago and that makes me qualified to lead people into battle. But I promised we wouldn’t let the rebellion destroy this stupid country and this is our best shot. We either trust it or we don’t.”

Brutus stays quiet for a minute, then snorts and socks her in the shoulder. “So inspiring,” he says, and when Lyme turns a flat stare on him, too weary even to glare, he drops the mocking expression. “I mean, not completely shitting you. You’d never get Twos on your side with a bunch of fancy fluff. You give them the truth, even if it’s hard, and you tell them what they need to do.”

Either death had mellowed Brutus, or the world really is coming to an end. Lyme drags a hand down her face. “So, what, you’re telling me you’ll follow me into this mess?”

“You dumbass.” Brutus shoves her. “I’m saying I already have. Now let’s go before this gets all mushy.”

It’s a sign of the times that Brutus and Lyme can make their way through a crowd of Capitol citizens together without anyone recognizing them, but with an actual war on their doorstep the people finally have something more important on their minds than celebrity-spotting two older Victors. The light is growing but it’s still dark enough that making out people’s faces is tricky, and both Lyme and Brutus have years of practice at slouching and making themselves look less physically impressive than they are.

She spots one or two others among the random citizens but doesn’t look, doesn’t even turn her head in case someone else notices the people in cloaks moving with quiet purpose toward the stage. A handful of rebel doctors - Coin’s people, not hers, Lyme can’t help noting, and wonders whether they have her authority or if they did this on their own - have set up temporary stretchers and are tending to the injured.

They reach the bottom of the stage and do their best to mingle without drawing attention. Lyme attracts an odd look from a blue-haired woman, but she keeps her gaze forward and the woman walks away, shaking her head. As Lyme waits - as they all wait - a single figure makes her way up the steps to the stage. She kneels by an injured woman, speaks a few quiet words, then moves on. After the second, a handful of onlookers start to whisper; by the third and fourth, a hush descends over the crowd.

Then Katniss Everdeen stands and raises her hood as the giant screen behind her flickers into life, and the park explodes into pandemonium.

The girl’s protection detail from Thirteen flank the stage, weapons drawn, and the initial surge recedes, babbling wildly to each other as her Capitol camera crew continue to film. Lyme studies the larger-than-life image of her projected onscreen, wonders what they’ll think of it seeing her like this: pale, exhausted, shadow-eyed and hollow-cheeked, no makeup or concealer to make her look anything but what she is. But there’s fire here too, for the first time in months, and she holds her head high.

When she speaks, silence falls.

“You know what I have to say,” Katniss says. “You’ve heard me ask you, again and again, to stand and fight. To look around at the courage of all those brave people who have risked everything to show you the darkness in this country. I know you’ve seen it. You saw it when the President promised two winners from the same district and then tried to take back that promise. You saw it when the Victors were promised a life safe from the Arena only to be dragged back in to kill their friends, their loved ones. You saw it when their bodies were sold, again and again and again, so that you play at romance. When their families were murdered if they said no. You saw my district burn. You saw hospitals set on fire with patients still inside. How much more do you need to see?”

Uncomfortable shuffling. Katniss forges on. “President Snow told you that I died, but he was wrong. I survived, and I kept fighting, and I’m not the only one.”

Since everyone knows the Mockingjay performs better without a prearranged script, they left the actual cue up to her, but Lyme recognizes it as if she’d been given an actual line. She and Brutus step forward with the rest, skipping the stairs and vaulting over the edge of the stage, carefully avoiding the recumbent bodies of the injured and coming to stand in a line facing the crowd as the other Victors file up to join them.

Not everyone who survived past the Quarter Quell, of course; a few died under torture, and some stayed behind in safehouses, and one or two it seems didn’t make it back to the rendezvous in time, but still, an impressive number. (She doesn’t see Misha or Emory or Devon, but Misha checked in, so they’re here somewhere.) Even better, at a suggestion from one of the other mentors, they arrange themselves in the order of how they arrive at the stage, not in blocks by district, and so Lyme stands shoulder to shoulder with Brutus and Cora from District 9. Jaded as she is after decades of image training and interviews and posing to effect, Lyme glances down the line and feels a shiver.

When Cora reaches for her hand, Lyme doesn’t hesitate.

“We’re here with a message,” Katniss says. “I’m done trying to convince anyone to fight. We’re here today to tell you that it’s time to accept the truth: it’s over.”

The crowd gasps. Lyme doesn’t turn, but she knows what they’ll be seeing: footage of President Snow in custody, by now safely away on a rebel hovercraft where no one - not the Peacekeepers, not Coin - will be able to get to him in time.

Katniss raises her fist in the air. “President Snow has surrendered! He has already given up the codes to deactivate the traps throughout the city. We are asking all remaining soldiers to put down your weapons. We stand before you now as Victors united in the promise of a free, and fair Panem. People of the Capitol, people of Panem: join us in celebrating a new future!”

The sun rises from behind the screen, dazzling as its rays burst forth in a shower of pink and gold, and Lyme will never make fun of the propo team and their timing ever again.

With the crowd in a frenzy, Lyme’s soldiers wait in position around the edge of the park. But when the Mockingjay - the girl on fire, the star-crossed lover - reaches out and takes the hand of Peeta Mellark, the mad energy flared, then collapsed and deflated. The power of love indeed.

Of course, it’s not over yet: the other recipient of the message had yet to respond, and will have just realized that she had no hand in the president’s capture, or Katniss’ survival, or the Victors’ - or the future that the Mockingjay just laid out.

“Do you think she’ll go for it?” Brutus asks her in a low voice. They’d discussed both options, try to unmask Coin the old-fashioned way or draw her out, but Lyme was sick of waiting.

“Only one way to find out,” Lyme murmurs back.

They hear the hovercrafts before they see the flickers in the air that mark the stealth fields. Then they uncloak, revealing sleek grey lines and the Capitol seal emblazoned on the underside. At her side, Cora freezes. “You don’t think -”

Understanding hits Lyme like a bucket of ice water, followed by an irritating prickle of - almost - grudging admiration. No one ever said Alma Coin didn’t have plans on plans on plans. “No, that’s a Thirteen shuttle, she’s just painted it to look like the Capitol’s. Which means -”

The lower hatch opens, and dozens of silver parachutes drop from the hovercraft, floating slowly toward the stage. “Oh shit,” Brutus says, jerking back. “I’m pretty sure those won’t have bread and apples in ‘em -”

Lyme starts to scramble back - nearly trips over an injured citizen lying behind her - a few of the Victors leap to the ground - others bend down, try to lift the wounded -

- the parachutes explode at once in a deafening percussive blast, sending bits of metal and scorched fabric raining down onto the stage. Lyme ducks, arms flung up to protect her head, but other than a singed sleeve and a few dings on her back from shrapnel pieces she stands up no worse for wear.

“They’d only just launched when they went off,” Cora says, shielding her eyes and peering up in open shock. “Ten, fifteen feet from the hovercraft at most.”

The hovercraft wobbles, smoke spilling from its undercarriage, and takes off in a low trajectory that will bring it down toward the middle of the city. Already a cadre of rebels have taken off in pursuit.

“Beetee,” Brutus says, smacking his fist into his palm. “Gotta be. Eibhlin said he and Rokia had some secret plan ready but couldn’t risk saying what it was, even under encryption.”

“Katniss!” A voice cuts through the crowd, piercing the wailing and hysterics, and everyone turns to look as their Mockingjay freezes.

“Prim!” Katniss Everdeen breaks free of the circle of concerned well-wishers and jumps from the stage, shoving aside the sputtering citizens to run toward her sister. “You’re not supposed to be here, why are you fighting?” They catch each other in a hard embrace, laughing and crying and talking over each other, and Lyme studies the crowd as they watch, at first reluctantly and then completely transfixed by the scene.

Wars are about the little victories as much as they are the big ones, Lyme reminds herself, and allows a quiet moment of satisfaction.

A rebel soldier jogs up to her, holding an inter-district communicator. “Sir,” he says, handing it over. “I, ah. Message for you.”

“Congratulations on your efforts,” Beetee says in her ear. “Can I expect some manner of fruit basket in exchange for mine? I believe if you recover the hovercraft, you will find concrete evidence that it was indeed a District 13 vehicle, complete with a copy of the orders from Coin herself.”

“The parachutes were a nice touch,” Lyme says, walking a little away from the hubbub so she can better hear the conversation. “A little on the nose, really. She really didn’t know we were here?”

“No, the bombs were intended for Capitol civilians. The parachutes were merely an attempt to create a sense of security, given their association with gifts and the like. The Victor correlation was quite the coincidence.”

“And Coin?”

“In her command craft, the controls of which I have remotely accessed and locked down once the bombs were away, as agreed,” Beetee says, somehow managing to convey savage satisfaction through a completely bland tone. “I can transfer them over to the officer of your choice at any point when you want to make the retrieval, but you needn’t worry about her escaping for the time being.”

Lyme sags. “So it’s done.”

Beetee’s chuckle rattles over her earpiece. “The megalomaniacal dictators are out of the way, at least. That’s a start.”

Lyme closes the comm and turns back to the other Victors, suddenly eager to find the others. So much work to do, and soon the reality of it will come crashing down; she needs a few minutes to hold her kids, hug her mentor, remember that they’d made it through okay before they dive back in to fix the mess. She finds Nero first by size alone, standing with Enobaria and Adessa (who was supposed to be in a safehouse, Lyme is pretty sure, but oh well), and - oh shit. Her stomach twists, because that’s his lost-a-tribute face.

“What happened,” Lyme demands, except she knows already. Nero is stricken, Adessa solemn, even Enobaria looks furious and wide-eyed, and only one person in the entire Village crosses over between the three of them like that. “Callista -”

“She didn’t make the rendezvous,” Nero says, his voice dull. “She’d never miss a grand finale like that. I can’t raise her on the comms, either. When I try her or Hera, all I get is static.”

“Maybe she got held up somewhere,” Lyme says, even as she knows. She knows, she’s a mentor, she knows better than that, but when she tries to accept the truth of Callista - vibrant, terrifying Callista - lying dead in the street somewhere, her mind shies away.

“Where are they!” Brutus thunders, cutting through the rest of their conversation. Lyme whirls to see him nose to nose with Misha, who’s smeared fingertips to elbows with blood in clothes that look like they went through a second Arena. Her heart drops. “Where the fuck are my kids!”

Lyme shoves her way between them, slamming her hands into Brutus’ chest and putting all her weight behind them. “Back off!” she snarls, adrenaline on high. “Leave her the fuck alone!” She turns her back on him, slow and deliberate, even as she can feel him trembling with anger behind her. Misha stands in front of her, filthy and blood-soaked with tear tracks winding through the grime on her face. “Misha, what happened?”

“I don’t know,” Misha says. “I don’t know, I - Devon stepped on a landmine, Emory got caught in the blast. We took them to the hospital, I tried to stay but he made me go, he said I had to - I couldn’t - he said we had to see the mission through.” Her voice breaks and she buries her hands in her hair. “I shouldn’t have listened, I should’ve stayed there, I never should have let him convince me -”

Her legs give out, and Lyme catches her around the waist and pulls her close. “Hey,” she says, putting on her best mentor voice. “It’s okay. You’re okay. Can you take us to the hospital?”

Misha nods, and she takes a long, deep breath and lets it out. “Yeah,” she says. When she opens her eyes she has a grip on herself, and Lyme has the horrified thought that she really, really hopes nobody tells her about Callista, not yet. Misha looks at Brutus, and Lyme pivots to glare at him but he’s no longer furious, just pale. “I’ll take you, I know the way.”

Claudius appears at her side, face drawn and white but determined. “You guys go, we can hold it here.”

It’s tempting - but no, she shouldn’t go running off at the first sign of personal trouble. “No, I’ll stay, but Brutus and Misha should go,” she says. “But Brutus -” The protective anger fades at the sick terror on his face, as Lyme looks at her own two kids and imagines what she’d feel if they were the ones dead or alive. She lays a hand on his shoulder. “She says they were alive when she left. Don’t - not until you have to, all right?”

Brutus smacks her hand away and stalks off ahead without waiting for Misha.

Misha lets out a shaky breath. “What do I do if they’re dead? How can I ever look at him again?”

“It’s not your fault.” Lyme runs a hand over Misha’s hair, or tries, but there’s too much blood. “He’ll see that, whatever happens, and I won’t let him blame you. But go, quick, the faster he gets there, the better.”

She turns back to Claudius, who in his grey uniform with the blood and the smudges and his quiet, evaluating expression looks more military now than she’s ever seen him. If not for the sword strapped to his back she could almost forget he’d been a Victor at all - until he breaks character and hugs her tight. “Lotta close calls there, boss,” he says. “Glad we made it out.”

“Promised you we would,” Lyme says, gripping him hard by the back of his neck. “Now go get Marius, we still have one loose end to tie up before we can start the clean-up for real.”

“So,” says Alma Coin, studying them with her usual cool grey stare, “I presume you’re here to kill me. Which one of you won the coin toss, or do each of you get a stab, classics-style?”

Claudius, standing at Lyme’s side with his arms crossed and fingers digging hard into his biceps, rolls his eyes. Finnick Odair lets out an unreadable chuckle, while Peeta Mellark says nothing, jaw clenched tight. Katniss curls her hands into fists. “We’re not killing anyone,” she says. “Especially not in secret. There’s been enough of that already.”

It’s just the five of them here, plus a handful of rebel guards. Coin tried to kill all the Victors on the stage at the end, and sent out the bombers to destroy the entire District 2 Victors’ Village, but these betrayals are the personal ones. The kill order against Claudius and Lyme, the suicide mission for Finnick and Katniss with Peeta as a secret sleeper assassin, these were attacks against her own people. They worked alongside her, sacrificed themselves to her cause, and she turned on them when they no longer served her purpose.

Coin raises an eyebrow. “So you’re here to gloat?”

Finnick shifts, twisting the rope bracelet around his wrist. “With all due respect, Madam Ex-President, I think we’ve earned it.”

“What I think is it’s ironic that you believe you’ve earned anything at all,” Coin says, calm but with an edge of steel. “You used my work, my soldiers, my spies, my years of infiltration and destabilization, my momentum, and you came in at the end and took all the credit. You took what you wanted and now you think you can toss me aside.”

“Excuse me if I’m wrong, ma’am,” says Peeta Mellark, and they all turn to look at him. He shifts away from their gaze but doesn’t back down, fixing his eyes on Coin. “I thought that’s exactly what you do - did, with us. Maybe we learned from the best.”

Claudius stifles a laugh into his hand, and this time when he glances at Peeta it’s with a flicker of something that might be the beginning of respect. Lyme would be more amused - and maybe she will be, later, with time - but right now all she feels is tired. Coin meets her gaze, a challenge and a test as always, and Lyme holds it with dispassion.

“Now that the war is over, there will be trials,” Lyme says. “Transparency. It won’t just be Coriolanus Snow on the stand. Everyone in this room knows you have a lot to answer for.”

“As if I’m the only one in this room who should fear a public inquest,” Coin scoffs, smoothing a strand of slate-grey hair behind her ear. “Everything I did can be justified under acts of war. In fact, I do believe I’m the only person without blood on my hands.”

This time it’s Lyme’s turn to roll her eyes, and to their credit, none of the other Victors sees fit to rise to that jibe either. “We’ll see,” she says. “We just wanted you to know that you failed. You tried to kill us, but we survived. And we’ll be here to watch you fall.”

“I see.” She smiles, thin and snakelike. “And how long do you think these trials will take before my official, public, transparent execution?”

“Nobody is executing anyone,” Katniss snaps, a flush spreading upwards from her neck. “Aren’t you listening? We’re done with death and mortal punishment. We all want Snow dead - I want him dead, you don’t think I dream about it at night - but what will that solve? The country needs to heal, not more blood.”

A pause, then Coin actually laughs. In all her time in Thirteen, Lyme can’t recall the president ever showing any emotion stronger than that enigmatic smile, and she has to fight not to recoil. Finnick wrinkles his nose like an offended cat, and Katniss blinks and jerks away. “You’re all fools,” Coin says finally. “No more blood! This country has sucked itself fat on seventy-five years of blood. It won’t be satisfied with weak, tidy displays of justice. By all means, try it, play your little games, but when the people are cold and hungry and the reconstruction isn’t going fast enough and they’re looking for someone to blame it on, you’ll wish you’d given them a spectacle. You’ll see.”

Finnick catches Lyme’s attention, lines tight around the corners of his eyes even as he keeps his tone light. “I think we should go, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Lyme says. “We’re done here.”

“One more question,” Coin calls out. Lyme folds her arms but waits while the others head for the door. “I saw you in District 2, playing the hero, getting all those people to follow your banner. What do you think your new friends will think when you drop this humble act and seize power like you’ve been planning all along?”

They stop, turn to look at her. Lyme stands there in shocked silence for a good five-count, but then the stress and the sheer absurdity of all of it breaks free and it’s her turn to burst into laughter, wild and incredulous. When she winds down they’re all still staring in mild alarm, but the kind that’s more concerned for her sanity than her political aspirations. “Oh boy,” Lyme says, swiping at the corners of her eyes. “I could make a speech about how some people want to do the right thing for the right reasons and not because they’re power-hungry assholes, but honestly? You severely overestimate my tolerance for political bullshit.”

“With a platform like that, I’d vote for you,” Finnick jokes as they head out into the corridor.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Lyme says, glaring at him as her communicator beeps.

It’s Misha. Lyme’s brief moment of humour collapses, guilt rushing in to fill the void. “You need to get everyone from the safehouses and bring them to the hospital,” Misha says, her voice thick. “It’s Emory.”