Chapter 6: Training Scores and Their Discontents

The training center smelled of metal and synthetic pine, as if someone had decided that violence required a particular atmosphere and had sourced it from a catalogue.

Maren arrived at seven with the other twenty-two tributes and stood at the edge of the entrance hall while a tall Capitol official explained the stations in the cheerful, practiced voice of a person who genuinely enjoyed their job. She listened to the whole speech. She had already known the content — Lumen had described the layout from accounts passed through District 8's whisper network, floor plans reconstructed from fragments of interviews and victor testimony and the small, specific details that tributes mentioned in broadcasts before they understood what details cost them. The stations were arranged in a rough oval. Weapons at the perimeter. Survival skills at the center. The assumption encoded in the design was that the center was where you went when you had already secured the perimeter, and that the perimeter was what mattered.

Maren went to the center.