Chapter Text
Plutarch didn’t choose the revolution overnight.
It was the little things. The long, messy, series of events that set off the alarm bells, the little sparks in Plutarch’s brain that lit up all the ways in which his government was eroding everything that made humans beautiful.
The Heavensbee family never had much love to give the Snows. Some old grudge about someone taking someone’s something, or at least that’s what Plutarch remembered his father grumbling about before his sudden death at the ripe age of 30.
His uncle, Hilarius Heavensbee, on the other hand, was a bit of a family legend. Which is what you call the family drunk, when you don’t want to call him the family drunk. Plutarch visited him every once in a while, usually the night of the Hunger Games victory party. His mother used to take him to visit his uncle every single year around this time and he pretended to come by as a continuation of her late legacy but in reality—he did it for the stories. The stories that spilled out of his uncle’s mouth as the alcohol made its way in.
This was a weird place for a Gamemaker to be on such a grandiose day, but his uncle only seemed to drink heavily enough to lose his filter around the time of the Games, so there were limited opportunities to get his stories. It was as if he wanted to miss the fruits of Plutarch’s hard labor year after year.
And besides, Plutarch never had the appetite for the celebrations that came with the ending of the Hunger Games. In his profession, all he’d be celebrating was impending unemployment.
“Hilarius?” Plutarch said, lingering in the doorway. Setting down the tray of candied oranges and exotic flowers, he pushed against the golden paved door and into the living room of the Heavensbee mansion. To no surprise, the sweet stench of the Capitol’s trademark booze was heavy in the air. “I believe our mutually agreed upon decision was more than clear last year, no celebrating before I get there.”
“Sorry,” came a mumble from the corner of the room, words spewing from the mouth of an elderly man sprawled over a fur covered recliner. His boots were splayed on the table, snake skin soles peeling off with age. Extending a bottle out into the empty air before them, Hilarious broke into a manic grin. “Saved some for you, my favorite nephew.”
“Your only nephew,” Plutarch sighed, though he did accept the bottle. Mostly to set it down somewhere outside of reach.
“‘Tis alright, I’ve got another,” Hilarius mumbled, though he made no attempt to grab the mysterious extra storage of alcohol, if it existed at all. There were clever drunks and there were stupid drunks and Plutarch would be ill-advised to categorize his uncle with anyone but the latter.
Really, that was Hilarius Heavensbee’s saving grace. He’d always been too vapid and self involved to cause any real trouble, even in a state of utter intoxication. Every word that came out of his mouth could be written off as the ramblings of a sad, old drunkard. Plutarch supposed that was why the President had left him alone, as he had no other explanation for why his uncle appeared to get an annual free pass to regard the leader of Panem with open distaste.
Plutarch had always wondered what it must’ve been like, to have gone to school with the president of Panem. Little was taught about Coriolanus Snow prior to his ascension and the people that were old enough to remember rarely spoke of it; most of them had joined Plutarch’s father in an early grave. Plutarch’s teachers talked about the phenomena of early deaths in the generation that lived through the war, something about how the starvation and toxins from the bombs during the Dark Days had led to their untimely demise. How to honor their deaths, the Capitol must do whatever it takes to keep Panem united and prevent the Districts from taking innocent lives ever again.
His thoughts were interrupted by a sudden emission of light from the TV on the wall opposite of them, the recap of the 65th Hunger Games alive before their eyes. It appeared his uncle hadn’t had the forethought to turn it off.
“The line of fallen victors,” came the voice of the ever embezzled Caesar Flickerman. “Their death will, of course, never be forgotten by our viewers.”
This statement was followed by a stampede of claps and screams from the audience, who seemed to believe that if they were loud enough, the kids could hear them from the dead. A part of Plutarch thought that they made so much noise right now to make up for the silence that would follow when all memory of the children would be lost in a matter of days.
Caesar continued to go over every single tribute that had died this year, some receiving more time than others depending on how interesting their performance had been. Plutarch had always found this to be a key challenge of the Games—to make the tributes interesting. Especially the young ones, 12, 13, 14, the ones who weren’t really old enough to have much of a personality outside of what their parents indoctrinated them with. Plutarch had tried a lot of different strategies to differentiate them, all to no avail. There was a reason child actors were so difficult to deal with and this was no different.
That’s why last year had been such an exciting change for once, with the victory of 14 year old Finnick Odair. The boy had played along with the Gamemakers so well during the Games and if there was anything Plutarch enjoyed about his craft, it was seeing its fruits move forward and thrive. With the amount of presence the boy already had at that age, he could only be expected to blossom further with time and Plutarch had been looking forward to following how his character would thrive under the spotlight. Or should’ve thrived, would be the better phrasing now.
His uncle ignored the line up of dead tributes until District 8, a skinny brunette girl with horrendous posture popped up on the screen.
Right, that’s the girl who kept talking about her hamster, Plutarch thought. I told her mentor, make her stop that. Sponsors don’t like the childish ones.
“Wovey! Wovey,” Hilarius cried, liquid sloshing behind the tinted glass as he shot up in his seat.
“Who is Wovey?” Plutarch asked, furrowing his brow. Wovey was not a Capitol name. From what Plutarch could recall from his studies, that was an archaic name from one of the latter districts.
“Oh, Wovey,” Hilarius sighed, a burp escaping his lips.
“Who is Wovey?” Plutarch asked again, the tears welling up in his uncle's eyes drawing his curiosity.
“They say she died of ‘bad’ water, but I knew better,” Hilarius said. Taking a deep breath, he continued in a hushed tone, as if anyone except Plutarch was interested in his drunk mumbling. He spoke with such conviction, staring at Plutarch with saucer wide eyes. The second his eyes landed on Plutarch they welled with tears, almost as if it was his sight that saddened the old man. “I knew but I shouldn’t have said anything, I shouldn’t have said anything. It was selfish of me, I am sorry. I am sorry.” Hilarius grabbed at Plutarch’s cheek with a greasy hand, a tear sliding down his cheek. “I am so sorry, my boy.”
Suppressing a laugh at the clown show, Plutarch fought to keep it together. “What do you have to be sorry for, uncle?”
“The poison, it was meant for me, you know? But the bastard couldn’t tell your father and I apart.”
“Pardon?”
“You know, I always thought all that stuff about twins feeling each other’s pain was a bunch of mumbo jumbo. But the day Harpius went to dinner with Snow, I could swear I couldn’t breathe. One moment I was fine and another I couldn’t breathe and I could swear there was blood in my mouth. I got so scared I ran to the doctor, but they said everything was fine, no blood,” Hilarius said, taking an angry swing of the magenta liquid and sloshing it around his mouth. “I told him. I told him not to go to that damn dinner.”
My father was poisoned? Plutarch thought, though he couldn’t quite bring himself to say it. He excused the cowardice with the potential of being listened in on, but regardless of how omnipresent that possibility was, he knew that with the amount of actually dangerous people in Panem, the chance of an 80 year old drunk’s home being bugged was slim. This conversation didn’t matter to anybody except the man who lost his father as a child.
“I never understood why he wanted to kill me. It was his tribute that poisoned my girl. My Wovey. I never did anything to him or that little bitch,” Hilarious slurs, a pathetic hiccup punctuating the sentence.
The decades of bottled grief spilled through Hilarius’ voice with such intensity that Plutarch had no doubt about their authenticity. What he had doubts about, however, was which parts of what the man had just disclosed were true to reality versus fueled by alcohol.
The rumor that President Snow poisoned political rivals or even simply those who knew a little too much wasn’t new to the elites of the Capitol—a title Plutarch much enjoyed being privy to as a Gamemaker—but it hadn’t been something he thought about much. Identifying yourself as a rival before a power manic dictator was idiotic and if Snow wanted to eliminate those people, that was one less liability for the rebel movement. Natural selection, really.
But the idea of his own family falling casualty to this cruelty? That was a thought that Plutarch hadn’t even considered. The Heavensbee family that built Panem up from a bunch of fallen bricks into a blossoming metropolis of luxury being subject to the same treatment as some rebellious idiots? Surely, it couldn’t be. The Heavensbee name should’ve been enough to protect them.
“What was her name? The rainbow girl,” Hilarious continues as if Plutarch wasn’t there at all. “Lucy! Lucy Gray. That little bitch.” Eyes widening with distress that nothing present inside his living room could be causing, Hilarius shook with a wild twitch. “His little bitch poisoned my Wovey just like he poisoned your father.”
“Uncle, stop,” Plutarch burst out, slapping a hand against his leg with alarm. What if they were listening? Hilarius would meet a sudden, tragic death, no doubt about it. “You don’t mean that gibberish.”
Hilarius did stop, to no credit of Plutarch’s plea but due to the onslaught of vomiting that hit his pathetic, inebriated form. He didn’t quite have the coordination to lean over the side of the recliner fast enough, so some of the puke found home all over his Chinchilla coat and armrest, the remainder dripping off the seat in nauseatingly long intervals. Hilarius just hiccuped once more, attempted to retch, and when that didn’t work, fell asleep in his own mess.
If there were bugs in this house, Hilarius was as good as dead. Plutarch’s words were little and vague enough to where he could likely still talk his way out of it, but his uncle? There was no saving him from himself.
Plutarch had only just expressed his distaste for those that make their rebellious thoughts so obvious, but looking down at his uncle, knocked out in his Chinchilla furs, reeking of fresh vomit and alcohol and unwashed clothing, Plutarch couldn’t help the anger that surged inside him at the thought of anybody wanting to hurt this sad, old man. The old man who’d never hurt a fly, the old man who sat here and wailed for a girl who’d been dead for decades. The old man who’d barely ever experienced hardship, much less the threat of being Reaped, but who drank himself into a stupor at the mention of the Hunger Games anyway.
Who did his drunken words threaten, exactly?
“Uncle, you are a mess,” Plutarch sighed. There was no saving Hilarius from himself and if Plutarch wanted to live another day, he needed to separate himself from this liability. “I will not return if you keep drinking yourself so far into such a dark fantasy world.”
Rising from his seat, Plutarch wasn’t given any send off except a distant moan that was more likely meant for some shadowy memory in Hilarius’ dreams.
Plutarch prided himself on creativity, but it was hard to imagine what had left his uncle to this sorry fate. The drunk disaster that was Haymitch Abernathy, Plutarch could understand. The man had won one of the most brutal and bloody Hunger Games as a child, there was little left up to imagination when it came to the origin of his issues. But Hilarius? Heirs to an incredibly wealthy aristocratic family who didn’t have to work a day in their lives weren’t supposed to turn out like this.
Shutting the door behind himself, Plutarch shook his head. He came here tonight to clear his head from weeks of nothing but the Games, but all he was leaving with was more questions. He’d make an appearance at the victory party for reputation sake but first, he had an inkling for where he could get an answer to at least one of them.
The living quarters of District 4 weren't too bad, though the view of the Capitol from the 4th floor could use some work. Plutarch supposed that’s one thing District 12 had going for them.
Knocking on the door, he wasn’t sure how exactly he’d begin the conversation. There wasn’t a good way, really. In his time as Gamemaker Plutarch had noticed one particularly disconcerting detail—while victors seemed to harbor unanimous distaste for talking about their own Games, they held even less enthusiasm for the Games of others.
Plutarch had been leaning against the door, which proved itself to be a poor choice when it flew open and sent him stumbling forward. To his credit, he hadn’t exactly been expecting a Hunger Games victor to swing open the door for any stranger with zero caution.
Mags stood behind the door, which explained the disregard. She didn’t seem to care for much of anything anymore, so long as it didn’t put her victors in danger. Which probably meant that her fellow mentor, 15 year old Finnick Odair, wasn’t here.
“What do you want?” Mags asked, wasting no time. She wore a thick bathrobe, nothing on her feet. To Plutarch’s great distaste, the District 4 crowd liked to treat everything as though it was a beach.
The problem was—Plutarch didn’t know what he wanted. To know more about the girl in his uncle’s drunk nightmares, of course, but how does one even begin to pose that question?
Taking one look at Plutarch’s lost expression, Mags turned around and walked back inside. Plutarch was about to follow her when he realized that it wasn’t an invitation. The woman was already on her way back to the doorway, accompanied by music blasting from a row of speakers on the walls that she’d just turned on. Would it hide the fact that their conversation probably wouldn’t be about Capital loyalism? Probably not. But at least it would keep them from getting quoted.
Still not having decided on a strategy, Plutarch decided to just be open with it; there would be no appreciation for his pleasantries here. “What can you tell me about Lucy Gray?”
The name seemed to make even old Mags lose her composure for a second, a ripple of surprise flashing through her features. Already starting to shut the door, she gave him a disapproving expression. “You’d make a shit Avox, Heavensbee. Go home.”
Bracing himself, Plutarch stuck his arm in the doorway. “Look, I know there’s no love lost between us ever since that…” Plutarch wasn’t sure how to put this. “That incident between the head Gamemaker and your boy. But hear me out, please.”
“That incident?” Mags said, the statement clearly having caught her attention enough to keep the door open even if it was to kill him. Giving Plutarch a look filled with the most vitriol he’d ever seen her exude, she whispered with so much force that she might as well had been screaming at him. “That incident?”
Well, I can’t exactly say out loud what happened between the head Gamemaker and your precious victor, can I? Plutarch thought, but he knew he couldn't say it. Couldn’t bring himself to verbalize what they both already knew. “I’m not him,” Plutarch breathed, searching for forgiveness within her eyes with a desperation he didn’t know he had. “I had no power to stop it, Mags. Please. You know I didn’t.”
“That doesn’t help Finnick,” Mags replied, though the murderous fire within her eyes began to flow away against a tide of exhaustion. The ridges within her skin deepened with the transition, almost as though the burden of the fatigue was weighing them down.
“There’s only one thing that will help any of us now,” Plutarch sighed. Mags was welcome to hate him but he wouldn't let her deny that he had put things on the line too.
Taking a deep breath, Mags closed her eyes for a second. “Come in, Heavensbee. Before I change my mind.”
“Thanks,” he said, shuffling inside before she could try to slice his hand off with the door again. It felt strange to adopt a subservient role to a person from the districts; wrong, even.
There was a fountain built into the middle of the living room of the District 4 quarters, made specifically for their enjoyment, but Mags only wrinkled her nose at it as she sat down on the couch across the room. “The first time I smelled chlorine, I was in the Capitol zoo.”
“Didn’t realize they let the tributes sightsee,” Plutarch said absentmindedly, more focused on how he was going to reintroduce Lucy Gray to the conversation.
“They didn’t,” Mags sighed. “Tributes used to be kept in the zoo. The years before me, it was the monkey pen but the rabies got so bad that they moved us to where the orcas used to be. There weren’t any orcas and the pool was dried up, of course, but the smell…” Mags trailed off for a second, staring ahead at the fountain in front of her. “I didn’t know what it was, but the girl from 11 told me it was chlorine. They use it in 11 as some sort of pesticide.”
“There’s no pools in 4?”
That drew a curt laugh from Mags’ lips. “The others thought it was funny too, that the girl from the water district didn’t know what chlorine was. But I told them, you can’t catch fish in a pool.”
“You know, if you don’t like the fountain, I’m sure there’s a way to remove it,” Plutarch shrugged, already thinking about how he could incorporate a pool into the next games. Frankly, he’d always thought a Games inside a building would be a fascinating idea.
Mags surveyed him for a second, then rose from her seat. “Walk with me.”
They strutted down the hallway, past the kitchen and the walls lined with oil paintings of the sea. Plutarch had never been to the coast—not much reason for a Gamemaker to travel outside of the Capitol. However, if he ever was to be granted the opportunity to leave, he would choose to see District 4. Even the Capitol can’t build an ocean, his mother used to say.
Opening the door to a room on their right, Mags stood in the doorway, motioning for Plutarch to look inside. The space was well kept, walls painted a soft blue, a pleasant juxtaposition against the pale brown wood lining the floor. There wasn’t much furniture in the room, just a poorly made king sized bed, a few decorative items, and a closet with several glittery outfits.
Walking up to the closet and running a hand over the golden net fabric, Plutarch narrowed his eyes. “Finnick’s room?”
Mags nodded, beckoning for Plutarch to follow her to the next room. They all looked roughly the same, only identifiable by the odd personal object or an outfit known to belong to a specific victor. Plutarch couldn’t understand the point of this little excursion and was becoming rather exasperated, especially considering that the music didn’t reach these depths of the living quarters and they couldn’t even speak.
However, when they reached Mags’ room, words weren’t necessary to explain her point.
It was one of the most beautiful fountains that Plutarch had ever seen, a circle basin of white marble cut into intricate gardens of the most delicate flowers, weaving over each other as their stems ran downwards and connected in the middle around a geyser of water. The water had been dyed in a delicate shade of turquoise, combining beautifully with the white marble.
The smell hit Plutarch almost as fast as the beauty, the odor of chlorine unmistakable in the air. It wasn’t overwhelming, not even particularly powerful, but impossible to miss. Anyone and their mother would pick up on the aroma.
“Poor taste to remove a gift, don’t you think?” Mags said, watching as the water was spat out in rhythmic bursts, a few stray drops landing on the edge of her bed.
The sound of a door creaking open interrupted Plutarch’s trance, the careful pace much more akin to that of a victor’s presence. They’d arrived back in the living room just in time to see a body smoothly squeeze through the crack, footsteps landing on the floor without making a sound. The stealth was impressive, frankly it was just bad luck that everyone was already wide awake.
About to sneak off into the hallway, the boy stopped short in his tracks at the sight of them, his body tensing up with alarm.
“Finnick?” Mags asked. Plutarch wasn’t sure why she’d even asked, considering that the impeccable form and bronze curls made it pretty clear who it was.
The shadowy figure relaxed as soon as his eyes identified Mags, dropping back against the wall. “I’m sorry, Mags. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
He remained unmoving as Mags walked over to him and put both hands on his cheeks. Finnick stood in her grasp for a few seconds, then put his arms around the woman’s small frame. The embrace was brief, but Plutarch could almost taste the worry that flowed from Mags upon seeing the boy.
“You didn’t wake me,” Mags said, breaking the embrace. She checked him up and down, gaze lingering on the sunglasses and scarf around his neck. Plutarch sighed, it appeared he’d done a poor job of following this year’s fashion catalogs for his summer outfits certainly did not involve these clothing items. And if anyone had to know fashion, it was the golden boy of the Capitol, the youngest victor. “Are you alright?”
Finnick was about to answer when he noticed Plutarch, immediately rising from the wall and to his full height, stepping in front of Mags.
Plutarch had always found the juxtaposition of the tributes in the arena versus real life to be fascinating. In the arena, Finnick had seemed like a deity of his own, massive against the backdrop of the other kids, gutting them with all but one graceful swing. His presence was capable of inducing both fear and awe, a trait that Plutarch always sought after when it came to predicting the winners. It was this quality that had earned Finnick such notorious desirability within the eyes of the Capitol viewers; apart from his beauty, his sponsors sought after the thrill of the knowledge that he could snap them in half.
However, when taken off the screen and placed next to Plutarch in real life, Finnick didn’t induce the same sensation. He was still tall and big for his age, but with Plutarch being a large man himself and having at least a 50 pound advantage over the boy, he didn’t feel particularly threatened. That feral horror that had been immortalized in the eyes of the tributes he killed on screen? Plutarch didn’t share it when he looked at the child in front of him.
“Good evening,” Plutarch said, unsure of how to talk to the boy.
“Good evening,” Finnick parroted back to him, frozen in place. Or frozen as best as he could be, for no true statue trembled like that. As much as the boy tried to appear threatening to defend his mentor, anyone could see the way that his body was assaulted with shivers at Plutarch’s sight. The boy seemed to notice as well and clasped his hands behind his back to contain the movements but the new positioning did nothing to hide the sounds of his shallow breaths.
Plutarch had always thought the lavish and seductive persona the stylists pushed on the victor at every opportunity to be over the top at best, vulgar at its worst, but now all he wanted to do was return Finnick to it. To put him back into the nicely contained box of the Capital extravaganza and makeup—to erase the child in him. Because right now, with the sight of the scared 15 year old in front of him, Plutarch couldn’t contain the burning need to talk to the boy, the need to tell him that he hadn’t been a part of what Theodoric Vandil had done. Yes, he had known—President Snow did enlighten Plutarch on how he likes to allow the Head Gamemaker to get acquainted with some victors, especially those with the potential to become “rowdy.” But that wasn’t Plutarch. He was just some guy behind the scenes, not the evil figure in Finnick’s nightmares.
“Finnick,” Mags said, placing a careful arm on his shoulder. “Heavensbee is a friend.”
“I have enough of those,” Finnick replied, Plutarch suppressing a cringe at the sultry whisper with which he spoke. Without the layers of sharp makeup and egregious Capitol clothing to accompany it, that voice seemed so painfully fake.
“I was just leaving,” Plutarch said with a smooth nonchalance, turning back into his official persona. There was no telling how much Mags had told the boy about her activities, but likely nothing.
“Stay,” Mags commanded, stopping Plutarch in his tracks. It was stupid really, the way that he felt compelled to immediately comply with her commands even though objectively speaking, he had the power. He was the one behind the gamemaker table. He was the one who could get her executed for treason in seconds. And yet, he was the one who bowed his head.
“My apologies, I do not mean to interrupt the business of the gamemakers. I am, however, exhausted, so I must make my leave,” Finnick said with a courteous bow of his head, seemingly having collected himself. Appearing to remember something, Finnick paused for a moment. “With your permission.”
Waiting for Mags to excuse the boy, Plutarch was met with a long silence. He couldn’t understand why Mags was holding back and forcing them to stew in this awkward silence until it occurred to him that it wasn't her permission that Finnick had been looking for.
“That’s fine,” Plutarch said, the words leaving his mouth rather hastily. This was becoming a rather uncomfortable experience that he hadn’t bargained for when first setting out to ask Mags a simple question. At this point, if Mags didn’t offer up answers any time soon he might also consider making an excuse to attend to the exit.
Beating Plutarch to it, Finnick gave a quick bow of the head and turned around on his heels, disappearing down the hallway that they had just emerged from.
Mags made no effort to stop it, her brows furrowing slightly as she turned her head to follow Finnick’s trajectory away from them. Giving Heavensbee a long look, she let out a sigh.
“My apologies, I did not mean to cause issues for you,” Plutarch said, for a lack of anything else to contribute.
“You didn’t,” Mags replied, voice heavy with exhaustion. “He’ll come around, eventually. But we must let him do so on his own terms.”
“He’s terrified, Mags.”
“He has to learn to trust people and that will take time,” Mags replied, voice firm and uninviting to outside input. “If he’s not ready in time, he won’t participate. But I won’t rush him.” Glancing at the door shut behind Finnick, she turned back to Plutarch and surveyed him with a disconcerting care. “Why don’t you sit down, Heavensbee. I believe I owe you an answer to your question.”
“She was the victor the year before me,” Mags said, handing Plutarch a cup of elderberry tea. “A 16 year old girl from District 12.”
“I wasn’t aware District 12 had another victor.”
“That’s to be expected, they fought long and hard to erase her Games from history.”
“Why?”
“She was incredibly charming, some sort of performer back home,” Mags replied. “It’s hard to make you understand the impact of that now, but the earlier Games, they weren’t like today. The tributes were locked in zoos, we were seen as animals. Nobody looked forward to watching a bunch of savages kill each other. But Lucy Gray, she drew people to her. She sang and she danced and she made people want her to live.”
“Then why is she so forgotten?”
Mags smiled into her cup for a second, as if seeing something reflected on the surface of the liquid. “She was too charming.”
“A problem I wish I had,” Plutarch said under his breath.
“There were several events in the Games that led to her win that were inexplicable. The Capitol tried to credit it off to her ‘special’ spark, but anyone with half a brain could put two and two together. The girl hadn’t just turned the district savages to her side. Someone with actual power had helped her.”
“Inexplicable like kids dying of poison?”
Mags tilted her head, surveying him with confusion for a moment. However, she soon nodded with recognition. “Ah, yes—Hilarius Heavensbee. He is your relative, is he not?”
“Uncle. It’s who I heard the name Lucy Gray from,” Plutarch offered, concluding that there was no point hiding his uncle’s treason, considering that he was surely committing one much worse.
“His tribute, I can’t recall her name, died after drinking bottled water,” Mags replied.
Wovey, Plutarch thought. Her name was Wovey.
“Can’t be sure the poisoning had anything to do with Lucy Gray, of course, but when only two people were left in the Games, her opponent also died of poisoned water. If you ask me, someone gave her that poison.”
“Do we know who?” Plutarch asked.
“Impossible to know for sure. But her mentor was none other than our dear President.”
“Snow? Surely you cannot be implying that he did it.”
“As I said, things were different back then,” Mags replied. “Snow wasn't President, he was an 18 year old boy. Who knows what a teenager is capable of doing.”
“I struggle to imagine what could’ve caused him to bend the rules like that, even back then.”
“Lucy Gray did prove that she could charm snakes,” Mags said more to herself than to Plutarch. “We’ll never know for sure, but it was the last and only time that Capitol citizens were allowed to mentor.”
“What happened to her?” Plutarch asked, though deep in his bones he already knew the answer.
“Never to be seen again after her Games.”
“You think the Capitol had a hand in it?”
Mags sat in silence for a long moment, genuinely pondering the question. “I’m not sure. There was something strange about that girl.”
“How so?”
“Too much life in her,” Mags replied, creasing her lips. “From what they told us, the girl wasn’t truly district. A band of traveling performers that just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time at the end of the rebellion. I’ve always hoped they just found a way to get away again.”
“Do you really believe that?”
Mags sighed. “No.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, drinking the tea and listening to each other’s breathing. Plutarch couldn’t help but recall from his research for last year’s arena that elderberry was a plant native to District 12.
After a while, he finally attained the courage to ask the question on the tip of his tongue. “Why did you decide to tell me all this?”
“Because Lucy Gray showed us the importance of having help on the inside,” Mags said, setting her cup down and lifting her faded green eyes to his. “You’ve been skirting around the line for too long, Heavensbee. I need you to make a decision.”
Plutarch sighed into the cup, his breath sending trickles down the steaming water. “It’s not that simple.”
“I know,” Mags replied, giving him a look he didn’t recognize. The tributes and victors looked at him in all sorts of ways—angry, jealous, vengeful, empty—but never like this. They saw him with whatever emotion they saw the Games. Never did a person from the Districts ever look at him with a softness in their eyes akin to sympathy. “None of this will be simple.”
“I always did like a challenge.”
Mags surveyed him. “That, I can promise you.”