The cabbage began to boil, filling the kitchen with the smell of poverty. Coriolanus jabbed at it with a wooden spoon. Still no Tigris. Soon it would be too late to call and make an excuse. Everyone would have assembled at the Academy’s Heavensbee Hall. There would be anger to deal with as well as disappointment from his communications professor, Satyria Click, who had campaigned for him to receive one of the twenty-four coveted mentorships in the Hunger Games. Besides being Satyria’s favorite, he was her teaching aide, and doubtless she would need him for something today. She could be unpredictable, especially when she’d been drinking, and that was a given on the day of the reaping. He’d better call and warn her, say he couldn’t stop vomiting or something but would do his best to recover. He steeled himself and picked up the phone to plead dire illness when another thought hit him: If he failed to show, would she allow them to replace him as a mentor? And if she did, would that weaken his chance for one of the Academy prizes presented at graduation? Without such a prize, he had no way to afford to go to university, which meant no career, which meant no future, not for him, and who knew what would happen to the family, and —
The front door, warped and complaining, scraped open.
“Coryo!” Tigris cried out, and he slammed the phone down. The nickname she’d given him when he was a newborn had stuck. He flew out of the kitchen, almost knocking her over, but she was too excited to reproach him. “I did it! I did it! Well, I did something.” Her feet did a rapid little run in place as she held up a hanger draped in an old dress bag. “Look, look, look!”
Coriolanus unzipped the bag and stripped it from the shirt.
It was gorgeous. No, even better, it was classy. The thick linen was neither the original white nor the yellow of age, but a delicious cream. The cuffs and collar had been replaced with black velvet, and the buttons were gold and ebony cubes. Tesserae. Each had two tiny holes drilled through it for the thread.
“You’re brilliant,” he said earnestly. “And the best cousin ever.” Careful to hold the shirt out of harm’s way, he hugged her with his free arm. “Snow lands on top!”
“Snow lands on top!” Tigris crowed. It was the saying that had gotten them through the war, when it was a constant struggle not to be ground into the earth.
“Tell me everything,” he said, knowing she would want to. She so loved to talk clothes.
Tigris threw up her hands and gave a breathy laugh. “Where to begin?”
She began with the bleach. Tigris had suggested the white curtains in Fabricia’s bedroom looked dingy and, while soaking them in bleach water, had slipped in the shirt. It had responded beautifully, but no amount of soaking could entirely erase the stains. So she’d boiled the shirt with dead marigolds she’d found in the bin outside Fabricia’s neighbor’s, and the blossoms had dyed the linen just enough to conceal the stains. The velvet for the cuffs was from a large drawstring pouch that had held some now-meaningless plaque of their grandfather’s. The tesserae she had pried from the interior of a cabinet in the maid’s bathroom. She’d gotten the building maintenance man to drill the holes in exchange for mending his coveralls.
“Was that this morning?” he asked.
“Oh, no, yesterday. Sunday. This morning, I — Did you find my potatoes?” He followed her into the kitchen, where she opened the refrigerator and pulled out the pan. “I was up until all hours making starch from them. Then I ran down to the Dolittles’ so I could have a proper iron. Saved these for the soup!” Tigris upended the mess into the boiling cabbage and stirred it around.
He noticed the lilac circles under her golden brown eyes and couldn’t help feeling a pang of guilt. “When was the last time you slept?” he asked.
“Oh, I’m fine. I ate the potato skins. They say that’s where the vitamins are anyway. And today’s the reaping, so it’s practically a holiday!” she said cheerfully.
“Not at Fabricia’s,” he said. Not anywhere, really. Reaping day was terrible in the districts, but not much of a celebration in the Capitol either. Like him, most people took no pleasure in remembering the war. Tigris would spend the day waiting hand and foot on her employer and her motley crew of guests while they exchanged morose tales of the deprivation they’d experienced during the siege and drank themselves senseless. Tomorrow, nursing them through hangovers, would be worse.
“Stop worrying. Here, you better hurry up and eat!” Tigris ladled some soup into a bowl and set it on the table.
Coriolanus glanced at the clock, gulped down the soup without caring that it burned his mouth, and ran to his room with the shirt. He had already showered and shaved, and his fair skin was, thankfully, blemish-free today. The school-issued underwear and black socks were fine. He pulled on the dress pants, which were more than acceptable, and crammed his feet into a pair of laced leather boots. They were too small, but he could bear it. Then he pulled the shirt on gingerly, tucked in the tails, and turned to the mirror. He was not as tall as he should have been. As for so many of his generation, a poor diet had likely compromised his growth. But he was athletically trim, with excellent posture, and the shirt emphasized the finer points of his physique. Not since he was little, when his grandmother would parade him through the streets in a purple velvet suit, had he looked so regal. He smoothed back his blond curls as he mockingly whispered to his image, “Coriolanus Snow, future president of Panem, I salute you.”
For Tigris’s sake, he made a grand entrance into the living room, extending his arms and turning in a full circle to show off the shirt.
She squealed in delight and applauded. “You look amazing! So handsome and fashionable! Come see, Grandma’am!” It was another nickname coined by little Tigris, who’d found “Grandma,” and certainly “Nana,” insufficient for someone so imperial.
Their grandmother appeared, a fresh-cut red rose cupped lovingly in her tremorous hands. She wore a long, black, flowing tunic, the kind so popular before the war and so outdated as to be laughable now, and a pair of embroidered slippers with curled toes that had once been part of a costume. Strands of her thin, white hair poked from the bottom of a rusty velvet turban. This was the tail end of a once-lavish wardrobe — her few decent items were saved for company or the rare foray into the city.
“Here, here, boy. Put this on. Fresh from my roof garden,” she ordered.
He reached for the rose, but a thorn pierced his palm in the shaky exchange. Blood welled from the wound, and he held his hand out to keep it from staining his precious shirt. His grandmother seemed perplexed.
“I only wanted you to look elegant,” she told him.
“Of course, you did, Grandma’am,” said Tigris. “And so he shall.”
As she led Coriolanus into the kitchen, he reminded himself that self-control was an essential skill, and he should be grateful his grandmother provided daily opportunities to practice it.
“Puncture wounds never bleed long,” Tigris promised him as she quickly cleaned and bandaged his hand. She snipped away at the rose, preserving a bit of greenery, and pinned it to his shirt. “It does look elegant. You know what her roses mean to her. Thank her.”
So he did. He thanked them both and sped out the door, down the twelve ornate flights of stairs, through the lobby, and out into the Capitol.
His front door opened onto the Corso, an avenue so wide that eight chariots had comfortably ridden side by side on it in the old days when the Capitol had put on displays of military pomp for the crowds. Coriolanus could remember hanging out the apartment windows as a young child, party guests bragging that they had front-row seats to the parades. Then the bombers arrived, and for a long time his block was impassable. Now, though the streets were finally clear, rubble still lay in piles on the sidewalks, and whole buildings were as gutted as the day they’d been struck. Ten years after the victory, and he was dodging between chunks of marble and granite as he wove his way to the Academy. Sometimes Coriolanus wondered if the debris had been left there to remind the citizens of what they had endured. People had short memories. They needed to navigate the rubble, peel off the grubby ration coupons, and witness the Hunger Games to keep the war fresh in their minds. Forgetting could lead to complacency, and then they’d all be back at square one.
As he turned onto Scholars Road, he tried to measure his pace. He wanted to arrive on time, but cool and composed, not a sweaty mess. This reaping day, like most, was shaping up to be a scorcher. But what else could you expect on July 4th? He felt grateful for the perfume of his grandmother’s rose, as his warming shirt was giving off a faint scent of potatoes and dead marigolds.
As the finest secondary school in the Capitol, the Academy educated the offspring of the prominent, wealthy, and influential. With over four hundred students in each class, it had been possible for Tigris and Coriolanus, given their family’s long history at the school, to gain acceptance without much difficulty. Unlike the University, it was tuition-free and provided lunch and school supplies along with uniforms. Anyone who was anyone attended the Academy, and Coriolanus would need those connections as a foundation for his future.
The grand staircase up to the Academy could hold the entire student body, so it easily accommodated the stream of officials, professors, and students headed for the reaping day festivities. Coriolanus climbed it slowly, attempting a casual dignity in case he caught anyone’s eye. People knew him — or at least they had known his parents and grandparents — and there was a certain standard expected of a Snow. This year, beginning this very day, he was hoping to achieve personal recognition as well. Mentoring in the Hunger Games was his final project before graduating from the Academy in midsummer. If he gave an impressive performance as a mentor, with his outstanding academic record, Coriolanus should be awarded a monetary prize substantial enough to cover his tuition at the University.
There would be twenty-four tributes, one boy and one girl from each of the twelve defeated districts, drawn by lottery to be thrown into an arena to fight to the death in the Hunger Games. It was all laid out in the Treaty of Treason that had ended the Dark Days of the districts’ rebellion, one of the many punishments borne by the rebels. As in the past, the tributes would be dumped into the Capitol Arena, a now-dilapidated amphitheater that had been used for sports and entertainment events before the war, along with some weapons to murder one another. Viewing was encouraged in the Capitol, but a lot of people avoided it. How to make it more engaging was the challenge.