LATER THAT NIGHT, Atlas watches his daughter depart from the dining table, having eaten her fill. Since this afternoon's training, there was an imperceptible shift in the atmosphere, but it stirred nothing within Alecto. Everyone had been looking at her then, as they had watched Katniss the day before. Everyone had seen Alecto, vicious and unrelenting, a storm inside the shell. Alecto's internal world was something she kept closely guarded, fortified by her silence. Nothing moved her, and words only pinged off her skin as if made from marble.

She is silent even when spoken to. At dinner, while Evander talked a blue streak about the art gallery across the street form one of his lovers' homes, she sat with her brows furrowed and her iceberg eyes sharpened to the lethality of wolf teeth. But she has a rabbit's speed and agility. Sometimes, while walking beside her to the training facility, Atlas often finds himself alone. He knows that Alecto has only run ahead or dropped behind, but each time, it feels as though she has vanished.

"I hear she made quite an impression during training," Iko said, lifting a brow as she peered at Atlas over her glass of wine. Only the second of the night, capping her intake. An improvement from before. Back home, she slugged bottle after bottle of drink just to fall numb, as if the mechanisms drilled into her bones back in her days at the academy had come undone and no longer functioned after her Hunger Games. Here, Iko had at least seen sense to be present, sound of mind and body. There was work to do and sponsors to sway.

"They saw her fight," Atlas said, unable to extinguish the spark of pride lighting up his tone. He flipped his steak knife over his knuckles and mimed a stab in the air. "She impressed them. Stole the show."

Grinning like he could eat the world raw, Evander reclined in his seat, throwing an arm over the back of Iko's chair. "Atta girl."

Iko cocked her head, narrowing her eyes at Atlas. "Now I know why she looked so dazed when you two came back. You need to tell your kid you're proud of her more."

Stabbing his fork into his mashed potatoes, Atlas lets out a grunt. In all his years, in all the time he'd spend raising his child to the standard he hoped his late wife would be proud of, he never once considered that Alecto couldn't tell that he was proud of her. Everything she had achieved came not from raw talent but from persistence and dedication. There might have been flashes of certain instances where he wondered if Alecto might have been of questionable character and ethics, but with the Games looming over their heads, the kind of iron-clad lifestyle they led, what situation didn't call for jagged edges and hard choices? It could only be to his relief that Alecto had grown that skin first before the world could draw first blood. As Atlas eyed Iko's elbow surreptitiously from his peripheral vision, he felt his stomach churn from the memory of Alecto's defiant eyes the night after the Reaping, those iceberg blues, and the concentrated darkness he'd seen reflected within them when he'd questioned her. A darkness threatening to swallow the fickle light of her soul, one whose origins he couldn't be certain of, and the silence setting in like the aftermath of a nuclear fallout.

Justifying Alecto's detrimental choices wasn't his aim. But he hadn't noticed that in all her silence, he'd neglected to tell her that he was proud. All their lives, they'd assumed they could read one another, but lately, Atlas had been having doubts.

Flicking his gaze up, Atlas' eyes snapped to meet Iko's involuntarily.

With a calculative stare, Iko cocked her head. She'd been watching him, and the way her stare burned, invisible hands clamped over his shoulders and holding him in place, the way her features kept shifting and shifting until he couldn't read her—not that he could in the first place, it was impossible to decipher anything from Iko—it was almost as if she'd come to understand something that he hadn't quite figured out.

* * *

IN THE HALF-LIGHT slanting in through the window of her bedroom, Iko traced the mountain range of Evander's shoulders through half-lidded eyes, soaring muscular detail, shadows filling in the dips and the edges, cutting penumbras into his tan skin. There was never quite a time where Iko hadn't been sharp, but now, in clandestine moments like these where the world was contained in four walls and the hands of a boy whose eyes were the colour of molten earth, Iko could afford to let her guard slip.

For now, Evander lay on his side, back-facing her, the sheets tangled around their legs. He'd fallen asleep before her, his soft snores gradually melding with the white noise of the air-conditioning unit, and the sounds of the city in a single, droning song that lulled Iko in and out of consciousness. Half-asleep, Iko stroked a slender hand through Evander's hair. They'd been lying like this since their conversation dropped off after Evander's eyes had begun to shutter and he'd started responding with monosyllabic answers, which then mellowed into two-toned sounds. It'd been a long day of running after sponsors and talking to the other mentors about Operation: Mockingjay. When Plutarch and Haymitch had first come to Iko with the proposition, Iko had contemplated leaving Evander out of the plan, but then she'd thought about all the times he'd sat with her through the nightmares, and how many times he'd accompanied her on the train when she couldn't stand the silence and filled it with his own light. When he had her back like that, she couldn't bear to leave him in the dark.

Hours had passed since they'd retired from dinner. Alecto had left first, and Iko couldn't scrub the expression on the girl's face from memory. Then Atlas had gone, but not after his daughter; Iko had always known he had problems with communication. Emotion had never been their strongest suit, but something Iko had learnt was that people wouldn't give you what you wanted if you never explicitly told them. It was something Alex had tried teaching her, but she'd been young and hard-headed back then, adamant on being unknown and unknowable, because to be known was to be seen and to be seen was to be hunted. That was the last thing Iko had wanted. Until the hard truth presented itself: there was a weaponised protection in being seen, because to be unknown was to be alone, and to be alone was to be vulnerable on all sides.

When this first began, it'd been a creature of desperation born from an abject loneliness and a trust that came only from the knowledge that there was no need for anyone else to know. After all, Evander still had the men and women in the Capitol to appease, and Iko was a threat to their affections. Three nights after completing her victory tour, Iko had retreated into her new home and became something of a recluse, tucked away in the shadows refusing to answer her door. Even now, Iko didn't know what she'd done those three days that'd passed in fragments. If she hadn't been asleep, she must've been drinking, finding solace at the bottom of a bottle. When she'd emerged from the arena a newborn monster baptised in blood with the scent of death dripping from her ledger, the numbness had set in bone-deep. Every night the nightmares chased her off the edge of her bed into the old abyss.

It'd been Evander who'd come barging into her home that fourth day and found her sitting on her rooftop, witnessing the world as if she hadn't wanted to be a part of it anymore. That evening, a storm had broken over the district and Iko had been soaked to the bone in seconds, but hadn't moved from her perch even when thunder growled and the lightning lashed against the dark columns of clouds. In the midst of the torrential downpour, Evander's presence was merely a shadow lapsing over her, blocking the stinging rain from bearing down on her exposed neck.

He'd brought food—she'd gone three days without any sustenance besides water and the idea of it made her shrivelled stomach roil. But he hadn't said anything. Just sat beside her and pulled her dishevelled hair out of her eyes, fingers tangling in the knots she hadn't bothered to care for in days.

Dying is easy, he'd told her after a moment's silence between them, shouted it over the dissenting rumble of thunder, living with the knowledge of what they could do, what they've done, is the impossible part.

It didn't feel quite right, spending their nights like this, just lying there with nothing to hold but each other, a steady heartbeat between the two of them, but it didn't feel wrong either. Some nights, Iko found it hard to sleep alone, but there were also nights where the warmth of another body felt too much like a fire crawling up her skin, threatening to raze her to a puddle of oil and ash. Tonight was the former.

In truth the nature of their relationship was nothing sexual, though at times it flirted with the fragile border that ran between platonic and romantic, though the general consensus was this: they were always going to be there to hold each other up, even through the nights where Evander couldn't stand to touch human skin, and even though each night she was in his bed, Iko cried for another boy who couldn't come home. Plus, Iko was certain that Evander's sex appeal was largely inflated by the Capitol, where his lovers—he said that word like it was blasphemy, like he wanted nothing more than to tear it to shreds and spit it onto the concrete—were always calling him to their beds. In the media's eyes Evander was more commodity than man, and it broke Iko's heart how he could smile through it all even when he had no choice but to return time and time again to the place he hated more than anything.

Only in this world could such disarming beauty be such a horrific thing.

Now, she stared at the back of his neck, which was smothered in bruises and tiny, scintillating scars as if someone had smashed a vase too close and the glass shards had nicked him. Hickeys from lovers who'd made house calls for him the moment they knew he'd be in the Capitol for the Quarter Quell clouded the mottled flesh. As if by some disconnect between her brain and her body, Iko pressed her fingers against them on impulse and felt a shudder of revulsion roil through Evander. She retracted her hand immediately.

In a rustle of sheets, Evander twisted round and pulled her into his arms. Warmth immediately engulfed her as his fingers tangled with her hair and Iko felt his chest rise and fall against hers.

"Hi," he rasped, smiling softly, and Iko hated the way her heart throbbed, for this wasn't like any of the smiles he offered to the cameras, no devilish gleam in his eyes, no affected charming edge. Nor was it a smile he flashed each time he came up with some wicked strategic play. It was a smile reserved for privacy. A smile they couldn't commodify. For a breathless moment Iko wondered if Evander ever looked at any of the people he met with in the Capitol like this, until she remembered that Evander only ever thought of them as jobs. To him, they weren't people but slots in his schedule and doors to knock on and free champagne.

A couple strands of his brown hair fell over his eyes, and Iko's fingers itched to brush them away, but for some inexplicable reason she felt frozen in place.

Cutting her gaze away, Iko pursed her lips.

He's not Alex, a bitter voice in the back of her mind hissed, and there was the guilt again, as if by lying with Evander like this she was somehow betraying Alex. He never will be.

He wasn't, Iko could admit. Evander was nothing like Alex, and Iko wasn't going to fall into the trap of deluding herself into thinking Evander—beautiful, tragic, and arresting—could ever replace the only boy she ever loved. But there were times when he would say or do something that struck the right nerve and in some uncharted territory of her brain Iko could close her eyes and pretend.

"I'm gonna get some water," Iko said, "you need anything?"

Evander shook his head, pressed his mouth against her temple in a feathering kiss, and released her.

She thought about the fact that she hadn't yet told him of Plutarch Heavensbee's plans.

It wasn't that she didn't trust him to keep his mouth shut: it was just that Evander saw too many people, and under the influence of whatever drinks his clients offered him, might reveal the crucial escape route Heavensbee and the rest of the victors who were in on it, and bring it all crashing down.

When the time came for the extraction to take place, Iko would tell him. When he'd mentored her, Evander's constant toasts to every Career tribute's ideals of glory, his radiant picturesque of the viciously confident Career tribute, had smelled of someone undyingly patriotic to the Capitol. Now Iko knew it was all just a slipcover. He resented them just as much as Iko did, but she had a feeling that, because of what he'd been coerced into, the resentment ran a little deeper, like an undetectable crack in a bone that fissured down to the centre.

As Iko wandered into the hallway to call an Avox, the automatic lights on the ceiling took a second to blink to life, but before the motion sensors registered her presence as she crept on soundless feet through the apartment, Iko caught a flicker of shadows spilling over the living room, colours skittering across the marble tiles like an oil-spill, red flickering over the walls as if the furniture had caught fire.

A thin, reedy silhouette sat pin-straight, spine erect on the couch as Iko emerged from the corridor, the blistering light from the hologram projection forming a beaming halo around it. Crossing her arms over her chest, Iko leant against the pillar separating the dining area from the lounge, and watched the screen over Alecto's shoulder. She was watching a recording of the Hunger Games, muted, which was why Iko hadn't been alerted to a second presence with the room until she'd seen the light flickering over the walls, illuminating the furniture, throwing shadows across the floor.

In the darkness, Alecto's white-blonde hair shone like spun sugar, and in person Alecto's presence was a ghost accentuated by the silence. Even in the flesh, there was something vaporous and hyaline about her, like she could dissipate into the ether at a second's glance.

On-screen, a girl with hair so matted and a face so bruised and bloody she was barely recognisable bared her teeth. She rose from the wet grass with laborious movements, an infernal rage in her eyes. As she held the gun out, Iko finally registered what she was looking at. On-screen, Alecto, dripping with blood, pulled the trigger, and the tribute standing before her inside the twisting maze that only got darker as the tributes went deeper flinched backwards, their body arcing as they fell. Brain matter sprayed across the camera, drenching the living room crimson light.

Not just any Hunger Games, Iko realised. Alecto was watching her own Games.

Taking her eyes off the screen for a second, Iko slinked closer, crossed the room to the sofa, where she could see Alecto's face. A face that bore no emotion, but something wild and feral and rotten scratching beneath. The Hellers were an intensely private family, both so locked up in the fortresses of themselves, defended by the ice behind their eyes. They were each elongated and angular and sharp, their elegance whetted by an edge that wasn't so much aggressive as defensive, turned into attack dogs only if triggered by an invasive presence.

"You should go to bed. You need to be at the top of your form tomorrow for the private sessions with the Gamemakers," Iko said, laying a hand on the top of the sofa, as if to lay a comforting touch to the younger girl's shoulder.

All the years she'd known and studied the girl earned her one lesson: Alecto did not like to be touched. Whether it was because she had never been close to anyone else but her father—who was arguably also a stranger to his own daughter even with such proximity—and she'd always been this way, or if the Games had turned all her human instincts inside out, immolated the need for company, the need for warmth and comfort, and made her into a solitary creature that shut the world and its people out, racing only with hostility in the face of affection, Iko would never know. It's not like Alecto would tell her, anyhow.

Silence met her. Not even a nod in acknowledgement. Alecto merely fixed her gaze on the screen, watching as her younger self marched through the maze, weapons strapped to her body, a ruthless creature come crawling out of her own viciousness, glancing over her shoulder every now and then, feet carrying her faster as shadowy figures darted and the maze seemed to shift and shudder. If Iko turned the sound on, she'd be able to hear the whispers in the undulating dark. When she'd first watched Alecto's Games in the Capitol, she couldn't bear to watch for longer than minutes at a time. There was something insidious in the air, a noxious toxin released as spores in the wind poisoning the tributes and pulling the darkest monsters out of the labyrinth of their minds and throwing them deep into the nightmare. For a solid week Iko had thought the gas had leaked out of the arena too as she watched tributes fall, making her skin crawl like a million phantom bugs broken out of their nest and scuttling down her body.

Flicking her gaze over Alecto's side profile, Iko couldn't help but ache with how young Alecto was. Not just younger, but young, so much of her girlhood not just stolen but torn to shreds. Back when they were kids, there used to be this idea that once they'd won, they would bask in riches and glory for ever. Now that they'd done it, runt he gauntlet and come out bloody and unshaved and unborn, when they looked back on the ruins and the ruination, all the damage not just borne of their killing hands, but the damage they'd sustained both inward and outward... Now they knew. There will be no glory. Only riches and an echoing loneliness. Creatures in pain isolate themselves from the pack for fear of social alienation, and so perform the severance themselves before they can be driven from the group. But the outcome of this was a slow suicide. Effects of isolation in the natural world include depression, poor sleep quality, impaired executive function, accelerated cognitive decline, unfavourable cardiovascular function, impaired immunity, a pro-inflammatory gene expression profile and earlier mortality.

If the Games had taught Iko anything, it was that people were never meant to be alone. Isolation was death. Back then, she hadn't realised it, but Alex was her pack, he was refuge and healing. She'd taken it for granted. And now, he was still gone. But you can always make new family to keep the wound from becoming fatal.

Lip twisting, Iko crossed her arms over her chest and sank into the spot beside Alecto, knowing that it was futile to try to persuade or badger Alecto into doing something she didn't want to do, because she had a particular gift for building walls that couldn't be torn down. If she couldn't get the girl to sleep, then she would keep her company.

Several minutes passed, and Iko's gaze had unwittingly drifted towards the screen. They were back at the maze, and Alecto's bloody face stared back. This time, there was something wild in her eyes that wasn't anger.

It was fear.

Alecto wasn't letting the tape play out, Iko realised. Instead, she was continually rewinding this one scene over and over. She was just watching this one snippet.

Drenched in blood, running deep into the maze now—the part Iko had missed as she'd been scrutinising Alecto's present self as if she were a live and unfathomable thing breathing beneath a microscope—and where the corridor was straight with no obstructions, Alecto stole flinching glances over her shoulder at something behind, something dogging at her heels that wouldn't let up. A shadow she couldn't shake. Iko had seen Alecto's stats when she'd been back at the Academy, and she knew she was the fastest girl within her cohort, clocking a time within a mile that shaved minutes off Iko's own record. But now, even with weapons strapped to her body, even with the full-day's weight of exhaustion and sustained injuries crippling her mobility, Alecto just might've been the fastest she'd ever been. Adrenaline pumping, desperation mounting, focus erring as she worried about her pursuer, it wasn't raw athleticism that spurred Alecto on, but primal fear.

Onscreen, Alecto banked hard, flying round a corner in the maze, not bothering to check if anyone was standing behind, waiting for the next unsuspecting tribute—an error that could've cost Alecto that made Iko's heart jump into her throat, and of which Atlas, at the time that Alecto's Games had been aired live, had been convinced that his only child was done for. Fortunately, by the time Alecto had reached the maze, most of the tributes had been culled, and the likelihood of anyone being within the vicinity, especially since the sheer size of the maze stretched for acres, was close to null, and Alecto shot down the next turn, nearly cutting into the corner of a hedge, as she pushed and pushed and pushed with such intensity that the camouflaged cameras mounted in the hedges barely caught a glimpse of her, this silver wisp of a blur, as she darted through the maze.

And then the camera cut to the space behind Alecto.

Brows knitted, pulse fluttering beneath her skin, Iko leant forward, elbows propped up on her knees.

At first, Iko thought it might've been a mutt, or Alecto's district partner, who'd placed second in the standings—granted, you needed a first place to live, and second was never going to be enough—coming after her.

But the corridor was empty.

Teeth snagging the rough skin of her bottom lip, Iko confronted the million questions that chased through her mind, clamouring over each other like a sea of ravenous zombies, as the tape rewound fifteen seconds back to Alecto's bloody face, back to the beginning, where the wild look in her eyes curdled her focus. Onscreen-Alecto wrenched her sword out from the chest of her motionless opponent, and as she made to clean the blood off the blade, something out of periphery from the camera angle—now trained on her back—had her go still as a deer in a meadow and so rigid Iko thought her back might snap. There was nothing chasing Alecto, so what had she been running from? It couldn't have been paranoia. The way Alecto had been running for her life, with such reckless abandon, as if any eminent threat lying in wait ahead paled in comparison to what was after her, couldn't have stemmed from that. And the fear on Alecto's face—Iko had seen it before.

The fear of the hunted.

In that moment, Alecto had shifted from the role of the predator into the prey, and like a nervous rabbit, had taken off like a shot the moment something horrible had caught her attention. Hurtling down the first corridor that yawned ahead, stretching for at least a hundred meters before it dead-ended at a sharp turn.

What were you running from, critter? Iko wanted to ask, feeling a surge of overprotectiveness for the girl beside her, frowning now, as she looked at Alecto, who would not answer. Alecto, who had been scared into silence, scarred over so much that she'd retreated into herself and moved as a shell of a girl, a mere echo of something that once was. If she was watching this now, as many times as she had, Alecto must have been living inside this moment, this meagre fifteen second clip, from the moment she'd left the arena. Who's chasing you still?

Victors of an antecedent Hunger Games always mentored for the next, but Alecto had been deemed unfit by the physician to stay on the train. Iko had stepped up instead, and mentored the two tributes of the 74th Hunger Games alongside Evander, who'd thought it convenient that he went to the Capitol with her as well since he had house calls to make. So what had scared her so badly that'd pushed her deeper into her body and stolen her voice? What was she hiding from?

And then Iko remembered the toxins. One of the commentators had mentioned its side effects—the main one being hallucinations that lasted for hours. The audience hadn't been privy to what the affected tributes had hallucinated, obviously, but the Gamemakers hadn't said anything either, which made Iko wonder if it was something that Alecto had concocted subliminally and inserted into the arena by herself, some invisible, perceived threat that hindered her, followed her home as a ghost and lived inside the house that built Alecto Heller as a haunting.

As much as Iko wanted to ask, she did not. Nor did she move even when Alecto turned the projector off, plunging the room into darkness. The curtains had been drawn, so the lights from the street and the building opposite couldn't permeate the closed membrane encapsulating the living room.

And so they sat like that, side-by-side, steeped in the blinding dark, Iko refusing to leave until Alecto got up to retreat to her room.

All this time Iko wanted to tell Alecto: you're going to be safe. I've cut a deal that would save you and your father. You'll have to trust me.

But she hadn't. Because Iko didn't need Alecto to relax. She needed Alecto sharp enough to keep both herself and her father alive until Beetee's plan came to fruition.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.
ugh this is going so slowly but whatever. anyway. evander and iko? thoughts?

iko's still in the process of moving on im not gonna rush her into something she's not ready for at all.

but y'all know me and my slowburns :)