Chapter 9: The Seventy-Ninth Games Begin

The tube is cold.

Maren registers this before anything else — the metal against her palms where she steadies herself, the recycled air with its faint chemical sweetness, the way the cylinder hums at a frequency she can feel in her back teeth. Around her the other chambers are occupied. She can see fragments of tributes through the curved glass: a shoulder, a jaw, the top of a head bent in prayer or nausea. She does not bend. She stands with her hands loose at her sides and counts her breaths the way Lumen taught her to count threads — not to calm herself, because calm is a performance too, but to know exactly where she is.

Forty-three seconds.