Fort was grateful he was stood in the shade of the Justice Building for the annual ritual of pretending to watch the film shown on screen – his head was pounding and the remnants of whatever he’d taken the previous night were making the floor look wobbly, like jelly, especially in the light. His mouth tasted like something had crawled in there and died, and when he surreptitiously sniffed under his shirt he could smell stale sweat clinging to his chest in spite of the freshly laundered shirt he’d thrown on.
As the voices on the stage droned on, Fort yawned and looked around him. Having watched reapings from other districts, it seemed that in the majority of them the crowd was bound in place by stupor or fear, but here the excitement and longing for glory practically crackled, connecting all of the people in the crowd like a giant nervous system. A synapse must have been missing somewhere around him. Once upon a time he had been a part of that electricity, but now he was a third-party to it, and had no longing to join it again.
In the crowd he spotted Marcellus and, at some distance over the plaza, Aelia, both as dispassionate as he was. He caught Aelia’s eye, smiled and then winced at the pain in his head. She stifled a laugh and looked back towards the front, leaving Fort gazing after her.
~
The previous day, Fort woke to the sound of his mother calling him. He let her shout his name a few times before finally rolling out of bed and stretching. “Coming,” he shouted to her, before opening his curtains.
It was late afternoon on the day before the reaping, and a golden glow was settling across the slope stretching down from his house, near the peak, towards the river. Other large houses studded the hillside, getting progressively smaller until they met the valley and finally merging into the buzz of the town below where metalworkers, illuminators and weavers of luxury fabrics worked alongside one another and bars spilled into the streets. He moved to the long mirror and pulled on a jumper, before wiping the sleep from his eyes and tousling his dark fringe back to life. He heard a gentle knock at his door and his mother pushed it open slightly.
“Fort, darling. I heard you didn’t show for training today? Your trainer dropped this card at my work for you. It’s to say good luck.”
Fort accepted the card with a small thanks, gave it a cursory glance and placed it on his bedside cabinet. He moved towards the en-suite and started to make himself presentable. “Why would I go to training? It’s the day before the reaping, and I’m not going to get reaped.”
Fort was the middle child of one of the largest and richest families in the district, and although he was at one time considered talented, he had never taken training quite so seriously as his trainers and teachers had hoped he would. He frequently felt he was just a background character in the story everyone had expected him to play – that of a natural-born career. But after years of training his heart hadn’t really been in it – there were always going to be older siblings stronger than him to volunteer, and younger siblings smarter than him to take on the family business. It was just the way it was, and he was happy spending his parents’ money until it bored him enough to settle down and do something with his life.
His mother didn’t answer, but sat on his bed, her brow furrowed. “But suppose you are, Fort. What then?”
He ignored this comment and continued to get ready, placing the golden stud in his ear, spraying his wrists with perfume, and pulling on a pair of high-waisted emerald green trousers. He moved into the bedroom and started to slide things into his pocket from his bedside table, careful for his mother not to see the pills.
“You’re not going out are you? The reaping is tomorrow Fort. Tomorrow. Please come and have dinner with us.”
“Sorry, mum. I’ve got plans. I’ll eat whatever’s left in the oven.” He leaned in to kiss her on the cheek.
“Fort. You need to grow up. This is embarrassing for us.” She went to return his kiss but he pulled away, shocked and sad. It was usually his father doing the lecturing – he relied on his mother to let him get off lightly.
~
“Five male and five female. Volunteering for tributes that are reaped is not allowed during this time.” At that, the crackling energy around Fort suddenly shifted, and a handful of low mutterings broke out briefly in the crowd. Fort frowned, and saw Marcellus frown a little distance away too. He hadn’t been paying much attention but he thought he had heard that volunteering wouldn’t be allowed. He felt uncomfortably like his safety net had been remove, and the falling sensation in his stomach confirmed that. He tried hard to focus on what was said next, in spite of the throbbing in his skull and the way the walls of the shops around the plaza seemed to dance mockingly at him.
“Capitol citizens… choose their tributes… a second public ceremony.” He wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but it sounded like the Capitol would be voting for the final two tributes. At least I’m not particularly charismatic, he laughed hollowly to himself. But the pit in his stomach didn’t go away.
~
Fort’s stomach was still tied in a knot when he got to Aelia’s house. The streets on the way had been strangely quiet for a Friday night in the hills of District One, with the shutters on many of the large houses drawn and, he supposed, careers sitting down for what they hoped would be their final meal at home before eternal glory came their way. Aelia’s parents, though, were in the Capitol on business, and any non-career or dispassionate career from the hills was to be found in her garden, drinking, smoking and chatting loudly.
“Fort!” Aelia screamed drunkenly when she opened the door. She grabbed his arm and led him through the hallway into the garden, forced a tab of whatever drug she had managed to score that day into one hand and a bottle of some sparkling orange alcohol into the other. “I hoped you would show up! We’re celebrating – Marcellus finally dumped Titus.”
Fort rolled his eyes and laughed, though the unease of his mother’s comment stayed with him, prickling. He remembered the last time he’d seen one of his old teachers – it had been at a bar downtown and when walking away from her she’d whispered, a little too loudly, what a shame it was that Fort turned out as he had. He’d had such potential. But once he’d realised he wasn’t interested in the glory of killing people, that all he really was interested in doing was spending money, he’d lost all his value. Marcellus slapped a hand on Fort’s shoulder, making him startle.
Marcellus laughed. “I’m free, baby! Did Aelia tell you?” Fort nodded and smiled at him, raising his glass for a toast. They’d all had such potential as kids – the thing uniting the people at this party was that they had no interest in the potential to be killing machines.
But then Fort caught the eye of a pretty girl across the room, and Marcellus, sniggering, whispered in his ear. “Go on – I hear she wanted an invite to this party just because you were here. We’ll talk about Titus later.” And moving over to the girl on the other end of the garden, snatching a drink for her from a table on the way, all thoughts of his potential disappeared. It was just him and her, in a sea of beautiful people.
~
The sea of people turned to look at Ford. It took them calling his name three times before he registered what was going on and stopped staring into space, trying to avoid eye contact with the windows on the shop buildings, which kept turning into eyes and blinking if he looked at them too long. “What?” Fort hissed at the boy next to him who was staring intently at him, and then it clicked. He looked over to Aelia and Marcellus, but both of them were as open-mouthed as he was. Ah fuck.
He slowly put one foot in front of the other and made his way through the crowd towards the stage at the front. He was the last person up there, and he could see the resentment painted on the faces of the other careers, those who actually took it seriously, when they watched him pass. He wanted to hold up his hands and say – listen, I’d love if you could volunteer for me, I really would. But this isn’t on me.
Swallowing hard, he climbed up to the stage and joined the line-up. His head hurt so much he couldn’t even look through the crowd to find familiar faces – he would just have to talk to them later. He hadn’t yet realised he was going to be locked up in the Justice Building for the next week, without booze. It was to be a miserable week, though he didn’t know it.
~
Fort jammed his key into the door several times before it opened, and was greeted by a cold and empty house – his parents and siblings always took a walk in the park early in the morning before the reaping ceremony, and he appeared to have been too late to make it this time round. I’ll just meet them there, he thought, as he grabbed an apple from the counter and made his way upstairs, eventually resorting to crawling on his hands and knees because the room was spinning.
On his bed lay a small pile of neatly folded clothes and a note in his mother’s hand:
I’m sorry for upsetting you – I know you don’t like training. I’ll talk to your father about finding something else for you to do. See you later, Mum xx
Fort read the note several times before folding it up and popping it in his pocket. He would apologise to her later, too, he thought. And he’d try and find something else he’d like to do – stumbling home with the sunrise had lost its lustre, as had everything.
