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After the Capitol fell during the Mockingjay Uprising, the provisional government assumed control of its archives without realizing the full extent of what they had been given. These included full and detailed records of all 75 years of the Hunger Games. All but one.
The records of the Fifth Annual Hunger Games had been almost if not completely expunged. Furthermore, there are no references to that year's Games in any of the years that follow. It was as though they had never happened. Most of those who witnessed it are dead, and those who survive scarcely remember it--in some cases, they scarcely remember anything. What follows is the only record our researchers were able to find, from a suppressed interview with the Head Gamemaker circulated in Districts 1, 2, and 4. The Capitol ordered all the copies destroyed, but a handful have survived.
We do not know the Gamemaker's name, nor do we know anything about him or her, save what is written here.
One doesn't talk about the first few years of the Hunger Games. There was a learning curve, much as with anything else, and with the country still reeling from the Dark Days and their aftermath, there was also some degree of corruption.
Certain creatures thrive in chaos, and Alessandro Borgia was one of them. It took him a bare six months to take complete control of District 1. It turned out being a goldsmith allowed one to open up an extensive market for illegal goods not normally available outside the Capitol's borders. It also made for a healthy business in bribes.
If he had stayed in the shadows, things may have turned out differently, but Borgia bought himself the mayor's seat and named his second son Head Peacekeeper. And that, as they say, was the beginning of the end.
***
Borgia's only weakness turned out to be a deadly one: His children.
It was perhaps inevitable, then, that on the next Reaping Day the first name to be called for District 1 was that of fifteen-year-old Lucrezia Borgia. She stepped out of the crowd like a butterfly and as the cameras drew near, she turned upon them the kind of smile that could stop an army in its tracks.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Your pardon.
You see, my family had been citizens of the Capitol for generations, ever since the Second Flood. I'd visited the other Districts--everyone does, on school trips and so forth--and I'd spent a good bit of time in 1 and 2 as we all do, but my life was in the Capitol and always would be.
Then came the Dark Days. I was in my final year of urban architecture at the top polytechnic when District 13 suddenly started appearing in the news. They'd always been quiet, sensible--as anyone should be around nuclear reactors. It had all been a front.
The greater surprise was when the other districts joined them against us. My cohort was conscripted after the government learned that we'd used plans of district cities as training exercises for creating our own. We were told to find weaknesses, secrets, the back alleys and, most importantly, the best ways in and out. And so we did.
The results of our work, we saw on the news.
When District 13 lay in ruins, its walls like half-melted candles, its reactors smoking and silent, the president stepped in front of the cameras and declared victory. The other districts did not argue, their resistance sapped with the stories that spilled over the borders of radiation poisoning and fires that did not and would not die.
It wasn't enough, of course. There would be reprisals, and all of us in the Capitol knew it. Ingratitude made monsters of the multitude, after all, and there was but one fate for monsters in this world.
The genius was in getting them to kill one another.
***
One might say I invented the Hunger Games as we now know them.
The first four had been an exercise in tedium, a mess of tributes slaughtering one another in the space of two or three afternoons. It did the job--the districts stilled and silenced as they watched their children die--but there was nothing to see.
All of that changed on the day one of my former professors asked me to design a completely new arena, one that would change the very face of the Hunger Games. There would need to be cameras everywhere, built into the very walls so as not to interfere with the tributes while making certain that everyone in the country could see their faces. The weapons would remain as they were--knives, spears, bows, swords, nothing more complicated. But this time, there needed to be a narrative. Something to hold the viewers' attention.
It was a masterpiece, and I will say so to this day. A sprawling estate in the wilds of District 12 (which, of course, nobody knew at the time), refitted and renovated with treasures plundered during the revolution. It had been, in its time, a shameless monument to capitalist ingenuity, a hotel, and finally, in my hands, a labyrinth of false doors, trick staircases, moving walls, and spy holes. I knew each and every one of its secrets; how could I not, when I'd designed them, transformed them from pinpricks on graphing paper into glorious reality?
But instead of tributes, I was to be given children. My arena, my creation, would be wasted on brats who could barely pick up weapons, let alone use them.
So, when the young, dark-haired man appeared in my fiftieth-story apartment overlooking the main square of the Capitol and handed me a letter on luxuriant, cream-coloured paper stamped with the red seal of a bull, I already knew what my answer would be.
***
They called him Valentino. I knew it wasn't his real name, but I also knew better than to ask who he was. He had a shadow, a lean and hungry man named Michelotto whose cavernous gaze I avoided on instinct. Their credentials were impeccable and their skills without question. Some part of me waited every day for the President's messenger, demanding to know where I'd found the two final members of my arena team, but none arrived.
If District 1 weren't trouble enough, it seemed the Capitol had decided to make its displeasure known on a more general scale. From each and every district, at least one if not both tributes were from a family the Capitol had deemed a threat.
All of this did have one discernible effect--the eyes of the whole country were on us. Even more so than usual, and not because the Games were required viewing in all households.
No, this time, they were riveted.
From District 3 came Henry Lancaster, an only son whose late father had been mayor of the largest city in the district, while Margaret d'Anjou of District 8 had lost both of her parents in the quelling of District 13. Each and every district erupted at the Reaping, the plebes watching in horrified fascination as the most powerful wept before the Peacekeepers and saw their children led away for the final time.
Valentino found me as I stared unseeing at the dossier for Henry Lancaster, aged fourteen.
"I can't promise you anything," I told him. "I will turn a blind eye, but the responsibility is yours and hers. Just give me a good show."
His smile was made of razors. "You have no idea."
***
I thought little of those words in the weeks that followed, too busy observing and cataloguing the tributes. It was less a question of who would win than of who would survive the longest.
The six from Districts 1, 2, and 4 were all the younger siblings of the newly flourishing group known as Career Tributes. There had been a roar of disappointment and rage in District 2 when the heavily favoured Edward York had been exchanged for his youngest brother Richard, a cripple with a twisted back and a bad arm. It was beyond laughable.
I did give the older boy credit for trying. He'd lunged forward through the rows of Peacekeepers, demanding to take his brother's place, and the crowd was with him, shouting "York" in perfect cadence. Tall and blond and dazzling, Edward was born to be a Hunger Games victor. He ought to have been mine.
Of course, the President had planned for precisely this. Volunteering was forbidden this year, by order of the Capitol, and the noise and enthusiasm slowly drained from the crowd as they realized this. What caught my eye as I watched this Reaping, however, was the chosen boy's response--quiet and cold and terse as he met his brother's eyes--captured by a lucky cameraman and broadcast across the Capitol to gasps and cheers there even as the nearby crowds were restive and uneasy.
"Leave me, Edward. I'll win. You'll see."
I could not help but watch him in training after that, nor was I the only one. One night, I even discovered Valentino with him on the roof of the tributes' living quarters, tirelessly training him with a blade small enough to hide even on his tiny frame. That there was a conspiracy at work, I had no doubt, and I closed my eyes to it.
All that mattered was my creation, and Valentino had given me his word.
***
I am not ashamed to admit that a number of tributes surprised me even before entering the arena. Henry Lancaster showed himself adept at wiring and disabling explosives, although it remained in question whether or not he'd live long enough for that skill to be of any use. Margaret d'Anjou turned out to be an excellent archer, and even the darling of District 1, Borgia's daughter, had a deadly eye for throwing knives and a surprisingly nasty uppercut.
But it was Richard York who held my attention, and that of everyone else. He was tireless, constantly in motion and exhausting to watch. He was also the very image of everything the Capitol hated. The stylists barely made a dent because he would not let them touch him. Several higher-ups in the administration begged the President to send the freak child back to District 2 and let the Peacekeepers finish him off quietly, but the President just looked at them with a deadly smile. "The arena will swallow him and the crowds will roar."
I refrained from pointing out that District 2 would starve themselves to feed their tribute if the York family had anything to do with it. Of course, if the viewing public hated him, his family could only do so much good.
All of this was before the interview, broadcast before all of Panem, in which Lucrezia Borgia giggled like a schoolgirl and admitted that he had pretty eyes. At that point, one might say all bets were off.
***
Henry Lancaster was the least likely of the survivors after the first day. Most of this, we knew, was due to the intervention of Margaret, the red-haired spitfire from District 8, who swept him up in the first rush and dashed off down one of the endless corridors away from the bloodbath that had just begun in the kitchens.
Henry also had a number of sponsors turn up following his interview, where he'd looked out into the audience with tear-filled eyes and wished aloud that he could win without having to kill anybody. No doubt at least some of these were dissidents, but their contributions were still permitted under the rules of the Games. We knew there was no chance of his survival, but nothing holds the interest of an audience like hope.
***
Margaret was a favourite from the start. Armed with a bow and arrow she'd barely managed to snatch from one of the wiry fisher children of District 4 in the opening carnage, her hair shining like a beacon, she was nothing short of dazzling.
It was her suggestion in the dead of the first night that Henry fashion a trap for the kitchen door. All of the bodies from the morning had long since been cleared away, but though the food and provisions, too, were gone, it was one of the few sources of fresh water in the arena. Just as Henry was putting the final touches on it, the burly second tribute from District 1 caught his ankle in the trip wire.
He was blown to pieces. Henry, standing a few feet away, began to shake and mutter under his breath. He crouched in the furthest corner of the hearth, tears pooling in his huge eyes, and would move for nobody but Margaret.
Still, she kept him by her side, and became the hero of District 3 as well as her own.
***
Everyone had expected an alliance to form between Margaret and Lucrezia, but only I caught the short moment between them in one of the many parlours, reflected here and there in a wall of mirrors. The freeze-frame made the cover of the three most prominent fashion magazines in the Capitol, offering readers the chance to recreate their hair à la Borgia or d'Anjou.
Lucrezia's smile broke half the hearts in the Capitol but had no effect on Margaret.
"It'll be worse, you know," said the girl from District 8. "It'll be worse if we're allies."
Lucrezia nodded. "You're right." She held out her hand and Margaret took it. "May the odds be ever in your favour."
"For now." Margaret's smile was predatory.
The blonde girl laughed without mirth. "For now."
The next time they met, Lucrezia pushed Margaret down a flight of stairs. When the camera zoomed in on her face as the cannon boomed, she was crying.
***
It took Richard several hours to find Henry Lancaster, who Margaret had hidden behind one of the secret doors in the attic. I wondered then and will never know whether or not Henry let himself be found.
He was kneeling before the window, murmuring something under his breath that the cameras could not catch.
"I knew it would be you," he said as Richard opened the door.
"Did you, now?" Richard asked, twirling the dagger between his fingers. "Do you know how it ends?"
"How else?" Henry turned, his steady gaze fixed on Richard. "It's the only thing you know, isn't it? Killing."
"You're not half-bad at it yourself."
Henry flinched. "I never wanted that."
"Rest easy, then. You won't be for much longer."
Henry closed his eyes. Richard swept the blade across his throat.
***
It ended in the garden at sunrise. The lighting was perfect, the choice of final tributes ideal. Beautiful Lucrezia Borgia facing off against the monster from District 2. The whole country was watching.
She had taken Margaret's bow and quiver of arrows; these she dropped beside the ornamental fountain. Slowly, she tossed her throwing knives on the ground, one by one. "Your turn, York."
He dropped his dagger--the one that had become his trademark--and shrugged. "I'm easy."
Lucrezia laughed. "Do you think they'd let two of us win?"
"Not a chance."
"And you wouldn't step aside for a lady?" She stepped forward, careful to stay out of arm's reach. "How very rude of you."
"I'm not known for politeness. And you aren't a lady. Ladies don't stab little girls when they're searching for water." He grinned, his teeth glinting in the pale pink light. That had been Lucrezia's first kill, one of the two skinny, pitiful tributes from District 12. "You're just as much of a killer as I am."
"They hate you, out there." She gestured vaguely away from the massive walls of the house, toward the false sun. "They'll judge you for the rest of your life. They'll blame you for killing their favourites. Wouldn't it be easier to just...end?"
"No." Richard's smile faded, his eyes like chunks of grey ice. "That's what you don't understand, Lucrezia bella." At the endearment, the girl froze. "They don't deserve any better than me. That's the whole bloody point. They want a killer. I'm giving them a killer."
You could have heard a pin drop in the control room. Valentino was gripping the arms of his chair so hard that his fingernails left grooves in the leather. Behind him, Michelotto had his shoulder in a death clamp.
"But you don't need to be," Lucrezia whispered. She reached out and brushed one hand across Richard's cheek. He shuddered at the touch. "Poor Richard. My darling, broken Richard."
He caught her wrist tightly. "I. Am. Not. Broken." And, drawing the tiny blade from his sleeve, plunged it into her heart.
Lucrezia gasped. So did the entire control room. Then, as we all watched in mingled horror and fascination, she grabbed Richard York by the collar and kissed him passionately before slumping to the ground.
Richard stared down at the golden-haired body in silence. He was breathing hard at first, and then he began to choke.
"What the--" I jumped to my feet.
Harsh, rasping laughter echoed from the corner where Valentino sat. He looked at me, his eyes like dark holes. "Poison, my dear Gamemaker. It's my family's signature."
"But..."
Richard York sank to the ground, blood frothing from his mouth as he twitched. I watched, transfixed, until he stilled.
That was when Valentino pressed the button and the entire Arena exploded.
***
There was no victor. There was no ending. My arena went up in flames and so did the Fifth Annual Hunger Games.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you will never hear any more on the subject.