Chapter 21: Horatio-7 Broadcasts the Flowers

The mentor's booth in the Capitol's broadcast wing smells of recycled air and old coffee, a combination that Horatio-7 has spent fourteen days learning to ignore. It does not smell of anything that has lived or died. This is, he has come to understand, the point.

He is watching seventeen screens simultaneously, which is not something the human visual system was designed to do and which he has gotten moderately good at through the specific kind of compulsion that arrives when you cannot stop watching something you are partially responsible for. Screen three shows the amphitheater's eastern quadrant. Screen seven shows Marcus Vane's last known position, updated every forty seconds by a tracker drone Seraphine Voss deployed at dawn. Screen twelve — the one he keeps returning to, the one his eyes fall on between all the others — shows the high catwalk platform where Hamlet and Mira have not yet moved, where Rue's arranged flowers catch the optimized morning light and hold it, and hold it, and hold it.

He made his decision four hours ago. He is still not sure this is accurate. It is possible he made his decision fourteen days ago and has been executing it in increments too small to register as choice, the way a river does not decide to reach the sea.