Chapter 2: What Lumen Taught Her to Count

The train leaves District 8 at three in the afternoon.

Maren knows this because she counted the seconds between the Justice Building and the station — one hundred and twelve, a number she will not need again — and because counting is what she does when she needs her hands to be still. The Peacekeepers walked her through a service corridor that smelled of machine oil and wet concrete, the same smell as every corridor in every building in District 8, a smell so woven into her that she has stopped being able to separate it from the idea of home. She filed it away. She filed everything away. There will be time to feel it later, or there will not, and either way the feeling will keep.

The car she's placed in is pale green, the color of something trying very hard to be soothing. The seats are upholstered in a fabric that is not linen and not wool and not anything Maren can identify by touch, which is unsettling in the specific way that only a weaver's daughter can be unsettled by unidentifiable cloth. She runs her thumb along the armrest seam and stops herself.