Chapter 4: The Capitol Sees a Girl from Seven

The parade feed came in on fourteen simultaneous channels, and Vellan Crace watched all of them at once the way a man reads a map — not sequentially but spatially, the whole surface at a glance, looking for whatever doesn't fit the expected terrain.

District One's tributes arrived in gold. They always arrived in gold. The stylist team had spent six weeks on the construction, and it showed in every articulated scale of the costumes, in the engineered way the fabric caught the torchlight and returned it amplified, in the precise angle of the tributes' chins as they rode their chariot into the square. Vellan noted this with the professional portion of his attention and moved on. Predictable. Technically excellent. Not interesting.

He found interesting things the way he found engineering problems: by looking for the structural anomaly, the stress point where the material was behaving in a way the design hadn't anticipated. He had been looking for eighteen years, first as an apprentice under the previous Head Gamemaker, then in his own right, and he had learned that the interesting moments were never in the districts everyone watched. They were in the gaps between.