A/N: Thank you to KenJ for beta-reading this for me. You gave me some great tips and suggestions.
Chapter One
District 9
Reaping Day
66 ADD
Clark walked with his parents toward the center of town. Today was the Reaping — the last one for him. At eighteen, he was almost past the age when he could be sent into the arena.
When they reached the Justice Building, he caught sight of three of his friends in the crowd. Indicating to his parents where he was going, he jogged off to join them.
Pete Ross was the first to catch sight of him. “Clark! Over here!” he called.
Clark winced slightly at the volume of his friend’s voice, reminding himself to try to control how much he heard. He’d learned several years before that he could hear much better than anyone else, to the point that loud voices could hurt his ears and overhearing whispered conversations could let him hear things he had no business knowing. Usually, he could control how much his ears picked up, but on occasion he forgot.
When he reached his friends, one of the two girls, Rachel, hugged him in greeting. Clark hugged her back with a smile. He had taken Rachel to the dance celebrating the end of their school years, and sometimes wondered if there might be something more between them than friendship.
It was common for residents of District 9 to marry at eighteen, as soon as they were no longer in danger of being Reaped. Clark had thought along those lines himself, though not as seriously as some — Pete, he knew, was planning on proposing to the fourth member of their group, Lana, if neither of them was Reaped.
When Clark had thought about marriage, it was always with the knowledge that he would have to somehow explain — or hide — the fact that he was different from everyone else. He had known for several years that he wasn’t like anyone else in District 9, though he had taken pains to hide that fact from everyone but his parents.
For the first ten years of Clark’s life, he had seemed like any other kid — healthier than most, a little stronger than his age mates, perhaps a little smarter, too — but essentially like everyone else. A few people had remarked upon his lack of resemblance to his father, but the Kents were respected members of the community, so no one said it loudly — and no one said it for long. The midwife who cared for his mother during each of her three subsequent pregnancies — none of which yielded a living child — had been quick to defend the Kents and quash any rumors.
When he was ten, however, things began to change. In school, he had discovered that he could run faster than the other kids — first just a little faster, then a lot faster, easily leaving the others behind. He had continued testing his limits, and by the age of eleven he could run as fast as a horse — then faster. When he had discovered that he could run alongside a Capitol train and keep up with it, his parents had decided that it was time to tell him the truth.
Just before his twelfth birthday, Jonathan and Martha had sat Clark down and told him about the night they’d found him in a rocket in a wheat field, and about the people from the Capitol who had come looking for the rocket — and for him — the next day. They had explained to him how they had deceived the Capitolites into believing he was their own newborn son — and then had told him, for the safety of not only himself, but his parents and friends, that no one must ever know how he had come to live with them in District 9.
And that meant keeping his extraordinary abilities a secret.
Clark hadn’t needed much convincing — like many kids his age, he wanted to fit in, not stand out. Standing out made a person the target of bullies, and though he could outrun any bully, their taunts still hurt. Even as a younger child, he had stood out in the classroom — he was smarter than many of the other students, and excelled at writing —
and some of his classmates had resented him. He might have joined them in refusing to learn had it not been for his parents’ obvious disappointment in him when he didn’t do as well as they knew he was capable of.
As time passed, Clark developed more unusual abilities. At thirteen, he had first shown signs of being not just a little stronger than his classmates, but extraordinarily strong — and nearly invulnerable — when the Kents’ rickety old tractor had hit a bump and flipped over while he was driving it. Not only had Clark not been badly injured — he’d only suffered a few bruises and scrapes, though such accidents were often fatal — but after he had crawled out from under the tractor, he had pushed it back upright with minimal difficulty. Within a couple of months, he could not only push the tractor upright, he could lift it off the ground — and he could lift anything else he encountered, too.
Though he couldn’t display his extraordinary strength and speed in public, it was a tremendous asset on the farm — he could move large loads of grain, plant a field quickly, and carry large animals that were sick or dead.
Some other abilities proved less useful, however. At fourteen, just after one of his classmates had been Reaped, he had been staring angrily in the direction of a bale of hay when it had burst into flames. Confused, Clark had quickly put the fire out, but had been forcibly reminded of the incident a week and a half later when his classmate’s death had been shown during the mandatory viewing of the Hunger Games — and the television had burst into flames. The fire had once again been swiftly extinguished, the flames themselves blamed on bad wiring when the television was turned in to the Justice Building and replaced — but the Kents had suspected that this was another of Clark’s abilities manifesting itself.
At home, they had worked with him, helping him to figure out what had happened, though with a safe target for the flames. Clark had soon learned to identify the sensation of heat in his eyes that presaged the beams of heat that he could cast. When he learned to use his heat vision deliberately, it was valuable for lighting the coal-burning stove that was used to cook the family’s meals and heat the house, or for burning debris or diseased plants.
Unfortunately, before he learned to control his heat vision, he had managed to cause a fair amount of damage. Half an acre of oats, several bales of hay, and the porch roof had gone up in flames before his father came up with an idea to help Clark be more aware of his heat vision. Jonathan had gotten a pair of glasses that had belonged to his grandfather, and he and Clark had recycled old, broken glass into a pair of lenses that had no effect on Clark’s eyesight, but did reflect the heat back to his eyes to remind him to control his heat vision.
That hadn’t been the only extraordinary thing Clark could do with his vision, though. Not long after he had finally learned to control his heat vision, he had found that he could also look through things. It had scared him at first — especially when he had accidentally looked through his teacher’s abdomen and seen an abnormal mass growing there. When the man had died a few months later, he had wondered if his X-ray vision was responsible, and it was only when his teacher’s wife had spoken to him, telling him that although the cancer had been diagnosed a year earlier, he had hung on for the sake of his students, and had been pleased to have such an extraordinary student as Clark in his last months of life, that Clark’s mind had been put at ease.
Once Clark was assured that his X-ray vision wasn’t harmful to those around him, he learned to control it and make good use of it — he could find vermin in the walls of the house and barn and pests in the fields. He could tell how far along a mare or a cow was in pregnancy, and whether the developing fetus was healthy, and he could see whether chicks were already growing in the eggs laid by the hens. Admittedly, like almost any teenage boy would if he found himself with the ability to see through things, he sometimes misused this talent — he peeked through the clothing of several girls before his father caught him staring at them a little too intently and replaced the plain lenses in his glasses with ones made from leaded glass in order remind him to respect others’ privacy.
His strong hearing had developed at the same time as his visual abilities. It had bothered him at first — he could hear everything happening for a long distance in any direction, including things he had no wish to hear. The sound of cats fighting on the Irig farm a mile away kept him awake at night, and the sound of a mouse creeping across the floor of the main room of his house had distracted him until he couldn’t concentrate on his homework. He had been more relieved to learn to control his hearing and filter out unnecessary sounds than he had been to learn to control any other ability.
By the age of seventeen, Clark’s abilities seemed to have developed to their fullest. He could light fires with his eyes, run faster than anything he had ever encountered, smell disease in the crops before it ever caused a problem, lift anything without the slightest effort, use his breath to freeze meat so it lasted longer, and even leap high into trees to pick fruit or onto the roof of the barn or house to make repairs. He needed less food than his parents, especially during the summer when he worked in the sun all day, and he needed far less sleep than them, too, often slipping out of the house after they were asleep or before they awakened in the morning. He would roam through District 9 at night, occasionally helping people when they weren’t aware of it — pulling stuck equipment from the mud, stopping hungry animals from ravaging crops, returning roaming livestock to its owners, and even stopping the rare crime. He was careful never to let himself be seen.
It was just before his eighteenth birthday, however, that his most amazing ability had manifested itself. He had leaped up into a tree to prune out some dead wood and, as sometimes happened, misjudged the height of his leap and gone over the tree. Instead of crashing to the ground, however, he had floated. Startled, he had panicked slightly —
and promptly fell to the ground.
He knew, though, that he had been floating, and so he decided to try it again. He leaped into the air — and this time he stayed there. Wondering if he could do more than just float, he had tried moving around the tree — and discovered that he could fly.
His parents had come from the fields shortly thereafter, wondering why Clark hadn’t finished his chores and come to join them. They had found him darting happily through the air amongst the trees, laughing with delight at this newfound ability.
When he’d seen them watching him, he’d dropped to the ground, landing a little too hard and winding up with his feet under the dirt. Jonathan and Martha had stared at him, not sure what to think.
Even their warnings that he needed to keep this ability hidden as well had only slightly dampened his enthusiasm for flight. Late at night, he would slip out of the house, skimming above the rooftops and trees. Soon, he tried going higher, into the clouds, where he spent a night watching lightning flash and hearing thunder rumble from below him, and had barely arrived home before sunrise.
On the night of his eighteenth birthday, Clark had decided to explore farther than District 9. He had flown past the electric fences and out over the wilderness, moving faster than any hovercraft. High in the sky, higher than any mountain, he had turned around slowly, looking across Panem. He had identified the Capitol, nestled in the Rocky Mountains — the only place, besides District 9, that he could accurately identify, as the Capitol did not permit people to possess maps of Panem for fear they would try to move from their own districts.
In the nights that followed, Clark had flown farther and farther afield, flying all around Panem. He saw the glitter of the Capitol, the semi-prosperous lives of some districts, and the crushing poverty of others. He even flew over a place he surmised to be the remains of District 13, judging from a building he remembered seeing on television, and was surprised to find that, far from being a barren wasteland, it was covered with forest. When he had landed amongst the ruined buildings and the forest, he had heard wildlife moving amongst the trees. What had surprised him even more was the sound of an alarm going off, causing him to leap skyward and fly quickly back in the direction of District 9.
Clark was pulled from his thoughts as they approached the front of the line. Letting the others go ahead of him, he discreetly bit down on his finger until he drew blood — the only way for him to give the necessary blood sample required of all children of Reaping age. It had been years since even the sharpest object could penetrate his skin.
The Peacekeeper took his hand and pricked his finger, ignoring the fact that it was already bleeding. “Clark Kent,” she intoned in a bored voice, allowing him to pass.
The four friends walked into the square outside the Justice Building together. Those eligible for the Reaping were grouped by sex and age — girls on one side, boys on the other, oldest kids in the front, youngest in the back.
When they reached the eighteen-year-old section, they separated, Rachel and Lana going to stand with the girls and Clark and Pete going to stand with the boys. Before the group split up, Lana gave Pete a quick kiss, then looked at the others. “Last time,” she reminded them. “And may the odds be in all of our favors.”
Clark looked up at the stage. The mayor was already there, as was the District 9 escort, Marcius Elphinstone. Pete elbowed Clark in the side and they both snickered at Marcius’ appearance — the man’s face was dyed an improbable shade of orange, while his hair was covered by a purple wig. Clark pushed his glasses down his nose a little and X-rayed the wig — underneath, Marcius had thinning brown hair that looked, to Clark’s eyes, far better than the wig covering it.
One of District 9’s two living victors joined them onstage, eyes bloodshot and body reeking so strongly of the drug he had spent the day smoking that even those without Clark’s enhanced sense of smell held their noses and backed away. The other, a thin woman who had won the Games in 53, was helped onstage by her husband. She looked drearily at the crowd, then flopped down in a chair and began to snore.
In the sixty-five years since the Hunger Games had begun, District 9 had had only three winners. The first, a boy who had won in 10, had died years ago, a probable suicide, though no one knew for sure. The second victor, Haver Ottosford, had won in 31. After winning, he had moved into his house in Victors’ Village and planted every inch of the yard with an herb known in District 9 as magic grass. He had been smoking it ever since, sometimes supplementing it with a potent liquor he brewed in his basement from grain, fruit, and anything else he could find. The third victor, Matilda Teig, was a morphling addict whose screams could sometimes be heard after her husband hid her supply of the drug to keep her from overdosing.
After looking uncertainly at Matilda for a moment, the mayor stepped up to the podium and began the yearly speech about the history of Panem and the purpose of the Hunger Games.
“Welcome, everyone, and Happy Hunger Games!”
The residents of District 9 stared back at him stonily. No one found the Hunger Games to be a reason for celebration.
Clearing his throat, the mayor went on, “Every year, we celebrate the Hunger Games in the honor and memory of Panem’s history. Before Panem, the world changed. There were droughts, storms, and fires. Earthquakes and volcanoes destroyed millions of lives, and the seas rose, wiping out much of the land. A brutal war followed for what little remained. From the ashes of this war and these disasters, Panem rose, a gleaming Capitol flanked by thirteen districts. Then came the Dark Days, when the districts rose up against the Capitol. Twelve were defeated, while the thirteenth was completely destroyed. As a reminder of the Dark Days, to ensure that they never happen again, the Hunger Games were established. Each year, each district sends two tributes, one male and one female, to represent them in a battle to the death. The last tribute standing wins, bringing honor to their district.”
Concluding his speech, the mayor stepped away from the podium. No one applauded.
Marcius stepped up to the first Reaping bowl, the one containing the girls’ names. “Happy Hunger Games! And may the odds be ever in your favor!”
Everyone bowed their heads, avoiding looking at him. Though catching his eye had no effect on whether or not a person was chosen as a tribute, the superstition remained. No one would look at him for fear they would be chosen.
Marcius reached into the bowl, withdrawing a slip of paper. “Becky Rasen.”
A small, painfully thin blonde girl emerged from the group of thirteen-year-olds. She walked slowly toward the stage, her eyes wide with fright.
An unhappy murmur came from the crowd. No one liked to see thirteen-year-olds Reaped. In all the years the Games had been going on, none had ever survived.
The murmurs were cut off as the Peacekeepers moved threateningly toward the crowd, weapons held ready.
“Maybe she has a chance,” Pete whispered to Clark. “Last year a fourteen-year-old won.”
Clark shook his head, looking at the girl as she almost fell climbing the steps. The previous year’s victor, Finnick Odair, had indeed been fourteen, but he’d also been from District 4, a career district, and had been sent a trident as a gift. In his skilled hands, the trident had ensured his win. In stark contrast, Becky was from a large, chronically undernourished family that worked in one of the factories, processing District 9’s immense grain crop for Capitol consumption. Even with the tesserae taken by the children of Reaping age, the family never had enough to eat, and Clark could tell from listening to her that she was in poor health, her difficulty in breathing probably caused by years of exposure to grain dust. In District 9, she would probably not survive to adulthood; in the arena, she almost certainly would not survive the bloodbath.
“Are there any volunteers?” Marcius asked. “Does anyone want to volunteer for a chance at greatness?”
No one said a word. Becky’s sisters ducked their heads, unable to look her in the eye. Family loyalty was in short supply on Reaping Day.
Marcius shook his head and sighed. No one ever volunteered in District 9, where the families of tributes started mourning as soon as they were selected. No one regarded the Hunger Games as a chance for glory.
He turned to the bowl containing the boys’ names. Clark ducked his head lower, resisting the temptation to use his X-ray vision to see whose name had been chosen. He could only hope it wasn’t him.
In the past, Clark had considered volunteering for the Hunger Games, knowing he could save the life of another boy, but his parents had forbidden it. They didn’t want him in the Capitol’s hands, knowing that their unusual son would be of great interest to the scientists there. They didn’t know if he was a Capitol experiment, as they had originally theorized, or if he was an alien, as the bizarre Jason Trask had believed, but if the Capitol officials found out what he could do, they would stop at nothing to control him — and his differences would be very hard to hide in the arena.
Clark didn’t give much credence to the idea that he could be an alien — District 9 had legends about aliens, but they all involved small green men with oddly shaped heads. Since Clark looked like anyone else, he felt that it was safe to assume that he was the result of some strange experiment.
He realized that his parents were right, though. If he was the result of a Capitol experiment, they would want him back, and they might very well punish his parents and even his whole district for keeping him hidden for so many years. That no one but his parents knew what he could do wouldn’t matter — the Capitol wasn’t known for its mercy.
And so Clark had kept his head bowed and his mouth shut as, year after year, boys from District 9 were sent into the arena to die. It had killed him inside to see them suffer when he knew there was something he could have done to prevent it, but for the sake of his family and his district, he had to stay silent.
So far, the odds had been in his favor. Though he’d had to take the tesserae three times in order to keep his family from starving — first when a drought had reduced the farm’s yield by a third, then when he was learning to control his heat vision and had wiped out some of the oat crop, and finally when a tornado had struck near harvest time and destroyed most of the corn — his name had never been selected. He had sixteen slips in the Reaping bowl, but out of thousands — the odds were still in his favor.
Marcius reached into the bowl and withdrew a slip of paper. When he read the name, Clark was forcibly reminded that even favorable odds weren’t a guarantee.
“Clark Kent.”
Clark’s head shot up in alarm. He heard his mother’s shocked gasp and his father’s quiet cursing. He saw the stricken looks on his friends’ faces. For a moment, he was tempted to flee, to simply leap into the air and fly away, far beyond the reach of the Capitol.
Then his conscience asserted itself. He might be able to escape, but his parents and friends could not. The people of his district, whom he had grown up with and worked alongside, would not be able to escape. If he fled, all of them would suffer.
Slowly, head held high, Clark detached himself from the rest of the eighteen-year-olds and headed for the stage. He stood beside Becky and looked out at the people of District 9.
Once again, Marcius asked for volunteers. Once again, no one spoke up.
The mayor read the Treaty of Treason while scenes from the Dark Days played on the screen above the stage. When he was finished, he gestured for Clark and Becky to shake hands.
Becky was terrified, shaking so hard that she could hardly extend her hand. Clark reached for her hand and shook it gently, wishing he could reassure her but knowing he couldn’t. He fought to keep his own face neutral, knowing that from now on, whether he survived the arena or died in it, he could do nothing to arouse the slightest suspicion that he wasn’t exactly what he seemed — just another tribute from District 9.
They turned back to face the crowd. Marcius stepped up to the podium and gestured to them. “Congratulations to this year’s tributes, Becky Rasen and Clark Kent!”
No one applauded. Instead, every person in the crowd bowed their heads and placed their right hands over their hearts in a gesture of farewell to their children.
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