The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: Chapters 21–24

Forward motion was often interrupted by long, unexplained waits. With the fitful travel and the jabbering of the other enlistees, he hadn’t slept a wink.

Perhaps he could nap now, then awake from this nightmare that seemed, by its tenacity, to actually be his real life.

Your pretty, vapid mother, who’d somehow convinced herself that your father would give her freedom and love.

CXS. Stitched in the same white thread as the border. Part of the border pattern, really, so unassuming that you’d have to look carefully for it, but irrefutably there.

He changed into spanking-new fatigues and received a duffel bag filled with additional clothing, a hygiene kit, a water bottle, and a packet of meat-spread sandwiches for the train trip.

Shorn, costumed, and vaccinated, Coriolanus joined a busload of recruits going to the train station.

Times being what they were, he spent the night helping them consume it and then awoke, a full day later, to find the train pulling into District 12 as a sultry Tuesday morning dawned.

The boys clumsily followed instructions for making them up, Coriolanus taking the top bunk in deference to Junius’s fear of heights.

After unpacking his duffel and tucking his precious box on the top shelf of his locker, he climbed onto his bed and perused the Peacekeepers’ manual—or pretended to—to avoid conversation with Junius, a nervous fellow who needed reassurance that Coriolanus was ill-positioned to give.

Although he’d been a Peacekeeper for barely a week, he seemed not only to know but to revel in the routine.

Smiley declared them all fast friends, and by the end of lunch, Coriolanus and Junius had been dubbed Gent and Beanpole respectively, one by way of table manners, the other because of his frame.

Professor Sickle’s instruction served him well; she’d always insisted on rigorous exercise, and he’d been marching in formation since he was twelve.

Blocks of training, eating, cleaning, and sleeping made up his new life. He moved through them mechanically but with enough competence to avoid reproach.

He saw himself in twenty years’ time, grown stout and stupid, the breeding beaten out of him, his mind atrophied to the point where nothing but base, animal thoughts of hunger and sleep ever crossed it.

Tigris, middle-aged but seeming older, sewing away in servitude, her kindness transformed to insipidity, her existence a joke to those she had to please to earn her keep.

As aggravating as Sejanus could be, he’d had no hand in Dean Highbottom’s vendetta against his father or in the handkerchief debacle.

As aggravating as Sejanus could be, he’d had no hand in Dean Highbottom’s vendetta against his father or in the handkerchief debacle.

Coriolanus flipped open the cover and found a diploma with his name inscribed in curlicues.

“So I’m not universally reviled?” said Coriolanus.

“Exactly. I think that’s how she thinks we all are. Natural-born killers. Inherently violent,” Coriolanus said.

On Friday morning, a tense mood infused the mess hall, and Smiley got the story out of a nurse he’d met at the clinic.

As the truck drove around the perimeter of the district, the buildings went from dingy to squalid.

Hollow-faced women sat on doorsteps, watching half-naked children with sharp rib cages playing listlessly in the dirt.

Even now it was transforming, changing from Arlo’s speech into something almost melodic. A string of notes that mirrored the inflection of his voice, somehow more haunting than the words had been.

Coriolanus’s instincts had been right. Sejanus was sliding into another ethical quagmire.

He could imagine the conversations that had transpired between father and son.

Getting a seat involved grabbing an old crate, spool, or plastic bucket from a pile in the corner and staking out a spot where you could see the stage, which was no more than an arrangement of wooden pallets at one end of the Hob.

Hauling out an instrument that looked like a huge version of the fiddle, a willowy young woman in an ankle-length, checkered blue dress gave the crowd a shy wave as she joined the others.

Burn it, spurn it, don't return it,
Break it, bake it, overtake it,
Wreck it, deck it, what the heck, it
Still comes a-crawling to you.

Some of the numbers bordered on unintelligible, with unfamiliar words that Coriolanus struggled to get the gist of, and he remembered Lucy Gray saying that they were from another time.

Miners who’d either ignored him or given him nods over their bottles became belligerent.

A fist caught Coriolanus’s mouth, sending his own fists into action. He struck out arbitrarily, focused only on securing his own circle of safety.

She seethed, her lips pressed into a thin, mean line that said someone would pay, just give her time.

“You know how the mayor is. Somehow her traipsing around at night will be our fault. I can do without a lecture.”

Sejanus told their bunkmates they were heading into town to see if they could swap a pack of Capitol chewing gum for letter paper, but the ruse proved unnecessary, as all the mates took their abused bodies back to their bunks right after breakfast.

Beyond the town center, the Seam sprawled out for miles, the regular streets quickly dissolving into a web of smaller, unmarked lanes that rose up and then petered out for no discernible reason.

The intoxication he’d experienced the night before in the Hob, the heady mix of liquor and yearning, seemed like a feverish dream now.

He’d never been motivated by love or ambition, only a desire to get his prize and a nice, quiet bureaucratic job pushing papers around and leaving him plenty of time to attend tea parties.

Why would evil incarnate help his girlfriend? Respect? Pity? Guilt? Morphling-induced whimsy?

Clerk Carmine hung his head off the loft, gazing unhappily at Barb Azure and Maude Ivory, who seemed to have worked herself into a state of indignation.