The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (The Hunger Games, #0)

by Suzanne Collins

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!”

Everyone had learned to despise waste. It was creeping back into fashion, though. A sign of prosperity, like a decent shirt.

A tendency toward obsession was hardwired into his brain and would likely be his undoing if he couldn’t learn to outsmart it.

OCD?

the bulk of the Snow family fortune had also been invested in munitions — but in District 13. Their sprawling complex, blocks and blocks of factories and research facilities, had been bombed to dust. District 13 had been nuked, and the entire area still emitted unlivable levels of radiation. The center of the Capitol’s military manufacturing had shifted to District 2 and fallen right into the Plinths’ laps.

A lot of those grand places will be going on the market soon. Owners not being able to afford the taxes, or some such, my father said.” The shield scraped the floor, and Sejanus hefted it up. “They don’t tax properties in the Capitol. Only in the districts,” said Coriolanus. “It’s a new law,” Sejanus told him. “To get more money for rebuilding the city.”

they barely eked out a living on Tigris’s pittance, the tiny military pension his grandmother received for her husband’s service to Panem, and his own dependent benefits as the child of a slain war hero, which would cease on graduation. If they couldn’t pay the taxes, would they lose the apartment?

Dean Casca Highbottom, the man credited with the creation of the Hunger Games,

He recited a brief passage from the Treaty of Treason, which laid out the Hunger Games as a war reparation, young district lives taken for the young Capitol lives that had been lost. The price of the rebels’ treachery.

The day, which had held such promise, came crashing down around him. First the threat of losing his apartment, then the lowliest tribute assignment — who, on further reflection, was definitely crazy — and now the revelation that Dean Highbottom detested him enough to kill his prize chances and condemn him to a life in the districts!

Dr. Volumnia Gaul, the Head Gamemaker and mastermind behind the Capitol’s experimental weapons division, had unnerved Coriolanus since childhood.

It was like the Hunger Games. Only they weren’t district kids. The Capitol was supposed to protect them. He thought of Sejanus telling Dr. Gaul it was the government’s job to protect everybody, even the people in the districts, but he still wasn’t sure how to square that with the fact that they’d been such recent enemies.

If the people who were supposed to protect you played so fast and loose with your life . . . then how did you survive? Not by trusting them, that was for sure. And if you couldn’t trust them, who could you trust? All bets were off.

How could their nutritional value matter to her? He realized he was just parroting what his teachers had said during the war, when one of the incentives for going to school had been the free snack provided by the government. The scratchy, tasteless things washed down with water were all some of the kids had to eat for the day. He remembered their little clawlike hands tearing into the wrapping and the desperate crunching that followed.

In those few words he sensed a shift in their dynamic. As her mentor, he’d been the gracious giver of gifts, always to be met with gratitude. Now she’d upended things by giving him a gift beyond compare. On the surface, everything looked the same. Chained girl, boy offering food, Peacekeepers guarding that status quo. But deep down, things could never be the same between them. He would always be in her debt. She had the right to demand things.

Lucy Gray’s words stung but, on reflection, were well deserved. Coriolanus had never really considered her a victor in the Games. It had never been part of his strategy to make her one. He had only wished that her charm and appeal would rub off on him and make him a success. Even his encouragement to sing for sponsors was an attempt to prolong the attention she brought him.

They helped to remind him that he was the real star of the evening. Even if Lucy Gray was confused on the issue, in the eyes of the Capitol, she belonged to him. What point would there be in crediting a district tribute?

It gave him time to reflect on what Dean Highbottom had said about the people in the districts. That they were essentially the equals of those in the Capitol, only worse off materially. It was a somewhat radical idea for the dean to be putting out there. Certainly, the Grandma’am and many others would reject it, and it diminished Coriolanus’s own effort, which had been to present Lucy Gray as someone completely other than district.

As if he were more a tribute than a mentor.

As if they're just tributes for the Capitol

“What happened in the arena? That’s humanity undressed. The tributes. And you, too. How quickly civilization disappears. All your fine manners, education, family background, everything you pride yourself on, stripped away in the blink of an eye, revealing everything you actually are. A boy with a club who beats another boy to death. That’s mankind in its natural state.”

bodies.

So they can learn her scent?