The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I: “The Mentor”

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Part II: “The Prize”

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  Part III: “The Peacekeeper”

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  Epilogue

  The Hunger Games Teaser

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  “Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.”

  — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651

  “The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. . . .”

  — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 1689

  “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.”

  — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762

  “Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

  Our meddling intellect

  Misshapes the beauteous forms of things;

  — We murder to dissect.”

  — William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” Lyrical Ballads, 1798

  “I thought of the promise of virtues which he had displayed on the opening of his existence, and the subsequent blight of all kindly feeling by the loathing and scorn which his protectors had manifested towards him.”

  — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818

  Coriolanus released the fistful of cabbage into the pot of boiling water and swore that one day it would never pass his lips again. But this was not that day. He needed to eat a large bowl of the anemic stuff, and drink every drop of broth, to prevent his stomach from growling during the reaping ceremony. It was one of a long list of precautions he took to mask the fact that his family, despite residing in the penthouse of the Capitol’s most opulent apartment building, was as poor as district scum. That at eighteen, the heir to the once-great house of Snow had nothing to live on but his wits.

  His shirt for the reaping was worrying him. He had an acceptable pair of dark dress pants bought on the black market last year, but the shirt was what people looked at. Fortunately, the Academy provided the uniforms it required for daily use. For today’s ceremony, however, students were instructed to be dressed fashionably but with the solemnity the occasion dictated. Tigris had said to trust her, and he did. Only his cousin’s cleverness with a needle had saved him so far. Still, he couldn’t expect miracles.

  The shirt they’d dug from the back of the wardrobe — his father’s, from better days — was stained and yellowed with age, half the buttons missing, a cigarette burn on one cuff. Too damaged to sell in even the worst of times, and this was to be his reaping shirt? This morning he had gone to her room at daybreak, only to find both his cousin and the shirt missing. Not a good sign. Had Tigris given up on the old thing and braved the black market in some last-ditch effort to find him proper clothing? And what on earth would she possess worth trading for it? Only one thing — herself — and the house of Snow had not yet fallen that far. Or was it falling now as he salted the cabbage?

  He thought of people putting a price on her. With her long, pointed nose and skinny body, Tigris was no great beauty, but she had a sweetness, a vulnerability that invited abuse. She would find takers, if she had a mind to. The idea made him feel sick and helpless and, consequently, disgusted with himself.

  From deep in the apartment he heard the recording of the Capitol anthem, “Gem of Panem,” kick on. His grandmother’s tremulous soprano voice joined in, bouncing off the walls.

  Gem of Panem,

  Mighty city,

  Through the ages, you shine anew.

  As always, she was painfully off-key and slightly behind tempo. The first year of the war, she’d played the recording on national holidays for five-year-old Coriolanus and eight-year-old Tigris in order to build their sense of patriotism. The daily recital hadn’t begun until that black day when the district rebels had surrounded the Capitol, cutting it off from supplies for the remaining two years of the war. “Remember, children,” she’d say, “we are but besieged — we have not surrendered!” Then she would warble the anthem out of the penthouse window as the bombs rained down. Her small act of defiance.

  We humbly kneel

  To your ideal,

  And the notes she could never quite hit . . .

  And pledge our love to you!

  Coriolanus winced a little. For a decade now, though the rebels had been silent, his grandmother had not. There were still two verses to go.

  Gem of Panem,

  Heart of justice,

  Wisdom crowns your marble brow.

  He wondered if more furniture might absorb some of the sound, but the question was academic. At present, their penthouse apartment was a microcosm of the Capitol itself, bearing the scars of the relentless rebel attacks. The twenty-foot-high walls were veined with cracks, the molded ceiling was dotted with holes from missing chunks of plaster, and ugly black strips of electrical tape held in place the broken glass of the arched windows that looked out over the city. Throughout the war and the decade that followed, the family had been forced to sell or trade many of its possessions, so that some rooms were entirely empty and closed off and the others sparsely furnished at best. Even worse, during the bitter cold of the siege’s final winter, several elegant, carved wooden pieces and innumerable volumes of books had been sacrificed to the fireplace to keep the family from freezing to death. Watching the bright pages of his picture books — the very ones he’d pored over with his mother — reduced to ashes had never failed to bring him to tears. But better off sad than dead.

  Having been in his friends’ apartments, Coriolanus knew that most families had begun to repair their homes, but the Snows could not even afford a few yards of linen for a new shirt. He thought of his classmates, riffling through their closets or slipping into their newly tailored suits, and wondered just how long he could keep up appearances.

  You give us light.

  You reunite.

  To you we make our vow.

  If Tigris’s revamped shirt was unwearable, what was he to do? Fake the flu and call in sick? Spineless. Soldier through in his uniform shirt? Disrespectful. Squeeze into the red button-down that he had outgrown two years ago? Poor. Acceptable option? None of the above.

  Perhaps Tigris had gone to ask help from her employer, Fabricia Whatnot, a woman as ridiculous as her name but with a certain talent for derivative fashion. Whether the trend was feathers or leathers, plastics or plush, she could find a way to incorporate it at a reasonable rate. Not much of a student, Tigris had forgone university when she’d graduated from the Academy to pursue h
er dream of becoming a designer. She was supposed to be an apprentice, although Fabricia used her more as slave labor, requiring her to give foot massages and clean clumps of her long magenta hair from the drains. But Tigris never complained and would hear no criticism of her boss, so pleased and grateful was she to have a position in fashion.

  Gem of Panem,

  Seat of power,

  Strength in peacetime, shield in strife.

  Coriolanus opened the refrigerator, hoping for something to liven up the cabbage soup. The sole occupant was a metal saucepan. When he removed the lid, a mush of congealed, shredded potatoes stared back at him. Had his grandmother finally made good her threat of learning to cook? Was the stuff even edible? He replaced the lid until he had more information to work with. What a luxury it would be to toss it in the trash without a second thought. What a luxury trash would be. He remembered, or thought he did, being very small and watching garbage trucks operated by Avoxes — tongueless workers made the best workers, or so his grandmother said — humming down the streets, emptying large bags of discarded food, containers, worn household items. Then came the time when nothing was disposable, no calorie unwanted, and no item unable to be traded, or burned for heat, or tucked against a wall for insulation. Everyone had learned to despise waste. It was creeping back into fashion, though. A sign of prosperity, like a decent shirt.

  Protect our land

  With armored hand,

  The shirt. The shirt. His mind could fixate on a problem like that — anything, really — and not let go. As if controlling one element of his world would keep him from ruin. It was a bad habit that blinded him to other things that could harm him. A tendency toward obsession was hardwired into his brain and would likely be his undoing if he couldn’t learn to outsmart it.

  His grandmother’s voice squeaked out the final crescendo.

  Our Capitol, our life!

  Crazy old woman, still clinging to the prewar days. He loved her, but she’d lost touch with reality years ago. Every meal, she’d rattle on about the Snows’ legendary grandeur, even when their fare consisted of watery bean soup and stale crackers. And to hear her tell it, it was a given that his future would be glorious. “When Coriolanus is president . . .” she often began. “When Coriolanus is president . . .” everything from the rickety Capitol air force to the exorbitant price of pork chops would be magically corrected. Thank goodness the broken elevator and her arthritic knees prevented her from going out much, and her infrequent visitors were as fossilized as she.

  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.