Chapter 4: The Capitol Receives Its Tributes

The Capitol smells like sugar and something underneath sugar that Maren cannot name.

She notices this the moment the train doors open — a sweetness so aggressive it has become its own kind of threat, layered over something older and chemical, the exhaust of a city that has never once considered what it costs to keep the lights this bright. She breathes it in deliberately, catalogues it, files it. She has been awake since the train slowed into the underground station, watching the tunnel lights strobe past the window in a rhythm that reminded her, with a precision she found annoying, of the looms.

The Remake Center is white. All of it — floors, walls, the ceilings so high they stop being architecture and become weather. She is separated from Cael at the entrance without ceremony, routed by two women in identical pale uniforms who do not look at her face, and she walks the corridor they indicate because there is no other corridor, and because the time for choosing corridors has not arrived yet.