ACT I. CHAPTER I. ❛ The Lucky Ones ❜ tw. mentions of death, mania, parental loss, blood, gore. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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Fog rolls in over the derelict buildings of District 3, swimming through broken windows. Verena Lark is perched, maybe seven or eight stories high, on a ledge of what she assumed to be an old factory. The windows were large and the building was made of concrete. Won't do much if something explodes. She glances across the way to see a hole blown out of one of the walls of a building. A humourless laugh passes her lips. She can't find it in her to feel guilty.
The sky is a shade of murky blue. Fumes from factories had long since tainted the clouds grey. The sky was never truly clear, and it was never truly blue. It hadn't been for longer than Verena could remember.
Birds don't sing, not this far into the district. Sometimes, if you get really lucky, you can hear the caw of a raven or the screech of a pigeon by the outskirts, but no one was stupid enough to go that close to the barriers —- not this close to Reaping Day. She sees Peacekeepers patrolling, crawling, swinging their batons from left to right, as though they were begging for someone to cross them.
Verena had only seen a flogging once in her life before, a young boy, maybe fifteen, had stolen some coppers from a merchant, and he would've gotten away with it too, had the Peacekeepers not been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The smell of blood and raw flesh had singed her nose for weeks.
She closes her eyes and listens, tucking her knees up to her chest. She can hear children scarpering somewhere, hiding from Peacekeepers no doubt. She can hear the thrum of a generator. And she can hear the unspoken truth that lies over the entire district like a thick blanket. That, in no more than a few days, two more children would be sent off to die.
District Three had never been lucky when the Capitol came calling to reap their pound of flesh. Every year, on July 4th, two members, a boy and a girl, of their community were ripped from their families and carted off to the Capitol to train, interview and compete in a televised bloodbath for the entertainment of the rich and wealthy. And every year, apart from a select few that Verena can barely remember, District Three held funerals for their children who had been murdered. She presses the heels of her palms into her eyes until she sees white.
The height of her vantage point allows her to watch her district move. She can see her school, one more year and she would be finished, left with few career prospects and fewer friends. She sees the stalls in the square bustling with life. People had to be stricter about what they traded and sold, what with Capitol officials scrutinising them under microscopes, but she had been lucky before. Three years prior, just before her fourteenth birthday, she had traded a cluster of purple gems that she had found inside a cracked rock for some silver pieces to a rogue Peacekeeper. Those silver pieces had brought dinner to her family's table for weeks.
