YESTERDAY

BEFORE THE MORNING LIGHT leaks over the district, Alecto finds herself hauling her father up over the top of the rock wall. Panting, Atlas rolls over on his back, chest heaving, blinking up to a dawn-dark sky that hadn't lost its stars yet.

"I'm getting old," Atlas grunts, sitting up once he's caught his breath and shucking off the pack strapped to his back. Truth was, Alecto had gotten faster. Something was driving her; he read it in the dead light in her eyes, a magnetic sharpness that never dulled. He'd always managed to keep pace with her. Just not today, when she wasn't so much distracted, but too present. When Alecto was focused on something, it lent her a frightening abundance of strength, a surge that could only be superhuman. Strong-willed, some would call it. Hellbent, Atlas thought. He'd seen it when he watched her slay her opponents in the arena. All odds should've been stacked against her, but, somehow, she'd managed to turn it around.

Settling down beside him with her legs crossed, Alecto pressed an apple into his palm. As they watched the sunrise gild the buildings in a halo of gold, watched the colours of a new day ripple across the sky, they ate.

"Back in the day they called them the Rockies," Atlas said, tracing a finger over the soaring blue mountains. Alecto followed the motion. He glanced back at her, something softening in his eyes, an edge of sadness that hadn't dulled over the years. "Your mother told me that."

Alecto sat upright. Her father rarely brought up her mother, Thalia, and when he did, it was always up here, far from civilisation. Up here in the mountains, Alecto was beginning to think, was where her father felt the least burdened by the nightmares that chased him out of bed and into the closet and down into the basement. Sharing the sentiment wasn't difficult. Up here, full of fire and guts and wonder, it seemed like all their problems were someone else's. Was this what the gods felt like when they looked down upon the humans and their tightly wound, mortal afflictions? Up here, Alecto felt it all melt away, like she'd left some of the weight at the bottom. The topic of her mother, however, was her father's greatest burden, and Alecto's biggest mystery. She'd been a newborn infant when her mother passed. All she had were pictures on the wall, and the little slips and slivers her father gave her. Pieces. Bits and pieces.

So far Alecto had gathered enough to fill in the bare bones of an outline. Her mother hadn't been a candidate for the Games. She was an orphan and Atlas had been her first and last boyfriend. They'd met on their first Reaping Day, when he'd spotted her across the Square, the prettiest girl in the district. She knew her parents got married the day Atlas returned from his victory tour, and she knew they never went anywhere without each other. She knew her mother would always sing to her swollen belly when she'd been pregnant with Alecto, and she knew her mother's favourite colour was robin's egg blue, like the walls of the nursery in her father's house that'd been remodelled as Alecto grew older. She knew she had her father's eyes, but everything else was all her mother.

Pressing her father for more information about what her mother was like, however, seemed to trigger a shut-down response. It was easier to wait for him to open up about her. Easier to listen. Ask no questions. Let him offer up the pieces of his broken heart of his own will.

Atlas drew in a soft breath. He fiddled with his wedding band, a strip of silver encircling his finger, which he never took off. "She never came up here with me, but she liked reading about the old world. Before the Games. Before the Dark Days. Before this became Panem." He sent her a look so sad Alecto had to shut her eyes. "She would've been so proud of you."

A dull ache shakes loose in the cavity of her chest. An avalanche dislodged by seven simple words.

No, Alecto thought, unable to meet her father's eyes. No, she wouldn't.

* * *

TAKING A LIFE REQUIRES A BRUTAL DISCIPLINE, a clinical sort of apathy, or a lethal desperation. It requires the killer to reshape their perspective entirely. Break the world down into cold facts and the most fundamental of functions. Once that's been achieved, the act of killing is easy. A human life is not some sacred thing. A person is made up of parts of a whole machine. Sometimes, that machine doesn't run right, or it's essential to the entire operations system. Perhaps that machine is simply outdated, and requires replacement. Taking a life is easy, when you think about the world like that.

Alecto's first kill had been outside the arena. Granted, she hadn't intended it to be. Her name was Diane, and everyone believed she was going to be the victor of the 73rd annual Hunger Games. Everyone, primarily being the administrative board of the Verity Training Academy, who, months prior to the Games, would pick two of the top trainees—one boy and one girl—to enter the Games. Victory to the district was ensured this way. Here's the deal: Alecto had been neck-to-neck with Diane, her ultimate competitor of the cohort for at least six years, until she realised she wasn't even in the race. Diane and her district partner, Nikolai, were their top choice. The deadliest. The smartest. The most formidable.

But her father didn't raise a quitter.

In fact, it'd been her father who'd told her—albeit, not exactly in application to this context—that if she really wanted something, she had to be willing to sacrifice everything for it. And Alecto heller would not die on the altar of second place. Sheltered by her father, and overshadowed by his achievements as a former Hunger Games victor, Alecto was sick of being known only by her father's status. Sick of gritting her teeth and taking all the condescending jabs the kids at the Verity Training Academy constantly fired at her. Sick of being told she was never going to be as good as her father, of being told she didn't have what it took to be a Career tribute. Especially when District Two's most favoured candidates for the 73rd Hunger Games were the two most insufferable people she'd ever had the misfortune to meet. Just because they'd been personally selected by the training committee of Verity Training Academy as the district's deadliest pair didn't mean anything. As long as Alecto was concerned, the female tribute spot belonged to her. And so did the crown signifying the 73rd annual Hunger Games victor.

What were people if not pawns and obstacles? Diane, the girl candidate, she could take care of. Finger on the trigger, Alecto's focus was knife-bright and sharp where she wanted it to be. Nobody else wanted it as much as she did. Nobody else would go to the ends of the world and back for the crown. Taking a life required a clinical kind of apathy, or a lethal sort of desperation, and Alecto was certain she belonged in the arena.

The night before the Reaping for the 73rd annual Hunger Games, she'd followed Diane all the way back from the her friend's house (Alecto had overheard the conversation between Diane and her friends about some dinner plans in the locker room) back to her home. Except, Diane never made it home.

At first, the plan had been to break Diane's hand. Handicap her so Alecto would be next-in-running for the Games. She didn't intend for Diane to fight back as fiercely as she did. She didn't intend for the shortcut Diane took home to pass the Quarry, where the silence echoed since the miners had gone home for the night, where the ground was littered with rocks. She never intended to dash one against Diane's head, crushing her skull, and then letting Diane drown in the brackish waters of the Quarry, where they wouldn't find her until three weeks after Reaping Day. Guilt never made a home in her chest, only triumph, that no one had seen her. All she did, she did to prove to her father that she could be deadly.

The next day, at the Reaping, Alecto volunteered. Nobody opposed her.

Just like tomorrow. Nobody would stop her. Especially not her father, who might be angry with her, but Alecto was prepared to bear the consequences.

Iko wouldn't be thankful, but at least she'd be alive.

Which is why, when darkness rippled across the sky the night before the Reaping Ceremony, when the district's noise had dialled down into its nightly lull, when Alecto heard her father's footsteps retreating into his room after bidding her goodnight, heard his door shut, heard him drift off onto a deep slumber, light snores and fitful rest permeating the silence, Alecto slipped out from under the duvet, already dressed in black. She fastened a black bandana over her mouth, pulled her hood up to mask her fair hair, and snuck out through her bedroom window.

A controlled fall down two stories into the front lawn and a handful of houses, and a tricky break-in later, she wound up clambering into Iko's bedroom window, light on her feet, silent as the shadows she made herself a master of.

Iko was asleep, her dark hair rising around her head like black smoke, her face, washed-out and pale. Asleep, but not any softer than she looked awake. When people slept, they wore different faces. Most people looked younger, less burdened by the world and the problems of the living. But not Iko, whose face remained sharp as the knives embedded in her walls, a single name on her lips as though desperate not to let him slip away in the only place he was hers again. Like the other victors, Iko suffered the nightmares. Her Games had been particularly brutal. All that carnage and blood—it'd been far more gruesome than any other. Despite her win, she'd lost, too. Her best friend, Alex, had volunteered to go into the Games with her. Even though it'd been seven years, Alecto didn't think she'd recovered yet. Her bedroom was littered with knives and empty glass bottles. Target boards were mounted to her walls, blades stuck to the hilt in the bullseyes. The name of her dead friend still a stain on her heart.

Alecto stepped over the mess, careful not to disturb anything, careful not to make a single sound. Iko fidgeted in her sleep, her mouth forming words that had no noise.

I'm doing this for you, Alecto thought, Diane's face flashing to the forefront of her mind. Except, Iko wasn't Diane. She was taking Iko out of the equation to save her. Watching Iko's expressions shift like the sands of the desert, Alecto stood over her friend—her sister, not by blood, but on principle. Even unconscious, she seemed to be fighting something. Always so angry, always unable to rest. Without thinking twice, Alecto raised the hammer over Iko's elbow.

I'm doing this to save you.

* * *

TODAY

ATLAS WATCHED THE TOWN SQUARE fill up with the tiding crowd, buzzing with anticipation like an electric fence, sharks swimming in blood infested waters. Vendors had set up their stalls bright and early in the morning, catching customers with hopes that their festive mood would lead to more cash spent on their goods. Predictably, they're not as economical as they are on any regular day. People splurge on Reaping Day tokens, caving in to the haggling.

At his side, Alecto tugs and fidgets with the dress she'd found in the back of her closet, a blue affair that clings awkwardly to her lanky body. Discomfort is evident in her stance. Atlas knows his daughter has always loathed formal dressing. Their yearly trips to the Capitol, requested by President Snow and obligational courtesy, as a formality to show gratitude to their former sponsors, were the subject of Alecto's deepest resentment. Unlike most victors, she kept her visits to the Capitol few and far between. While Atlas made a point to socialise with the other victors—generally avoiding the non-Career district ones, unless they approached him without inherent hatred like Beetee, a former victor from District 3, had, a few years ago—Alecto shut everyone out. Dinners with her sponsors were always silent and painful to get through. Atlas was always the one who'd had to fill in the gaps his daughter left.

Only seven out of nine victors were gathered in the Justice Building, the curtains pulled back so Enobaria and Atlas could watch the crowd while the others picked at the vibrant feast like fructifying flesh laid out on the oak table in the centre of the room of marble walls and a silence like an echo in a mausoleum. While they waited on Iko and Evander to arrive, Atlas leant his forehead against the cool glass.

"Excited to get back on that train?" Enobaria asked, her tone a sardonic drawl. She flashed a grin and the razor-sharp points of her surgically altered teeth gleamed. Against her bronze skin, her gold dress glittered in the sunlight streaming through the window.

"Dying to," Atlas said, managing a humourless smile. Volunteering to mentor had landed them back on the train they'd been struggling to get off for years. Usually, in other districts, victors took turns—the newest victor would take over as mentor, allowing their mentor breathing space outside of the platform—and the cycle continued uniformly. In District 2, the victors drew lots. There were enough of them to take turns, make a gamble out of it.

The polished wooden doors opened with a slam as Iko limped in on a pair of crutches and her right arm in a sling, Evander rushing in behind her, offering his assistance, only to be met with a wall of furious silence. A thunderstorm of rage trailed Iko, a darkness wicking off her skin as she cut them all a flinty glare. For a stunned moment, all the other victors could only stare back, taking in the sight. And then reality came crashing down.

"What happened?" Atlas demanded, his voice a low thunder.

Something in her eyes flashed. Iko glowered. "Someone broke into my house last night. Evander took me to the healer this morning—"

"She refused the pain meds," Evander said, shaking his head. Frustration tightened the lines of his face as he raked a hand through his brown hair. He slanted Iko an incendiary glare.

"I don't need a numbing agent," Iko growled, shooting back a stubborn scowl.

"The Capitol will fix her up," Lyme said.

A shattered elbow and a leg broken in three places, she told them. Iko could barely stand without the crutches. She must've gone to see a physician earlier this morning. Concern etched on his face, Evander pulled out a chair before Iko collapsed into it.

Taking inventory of Iko's injuries, Enobaria's lip curled. "Did you see who did this?"

Atlas placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. Iko shook her head.

"They didn't say anything," Iko said, unsmiling. Come to think of it, Atlas didn't think he's ever seen Iko smile. Not even when she was in the Games. Not even when she'd won it. And in the rare moments that she did, her smiles were more condescending than genuine. But the thing that surprised him most was that what'd brought her home still stood true. Rage kept her standing. "Their face was covered, and it was too dark to see anything. By the time I got the light on, they were gone."

Out of the corner of his eye, Alecto stiffened, but her expression remained hard as granite, and her eyes were blue fire. In retrospect, Atlas should've seen it coming. How distracted she'd been this morning. Resolution set into the lines of her face. An unwavering focus, a knife thrown true seeking out a heart. And the biggest tip of them all: silence.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.
OKAYYYY SOOOOO would anyone like to share their thoughts about the shit that went down in this chapter????

also would anyone like to read a fic with alecto's hunger games????? because i have something in the works....