Chapter 24: The Final Stage — What Hamlet and Marcus Resolve

The central stage arrives before Hamlet is ready for it, which is to say it arrives at the appointed time.

The arena collapses inward in stages — not catastrophically, not all at once, but with the patient, engineered precision of a set being struck after a long run. The eastern tiers fold first, a sound like a continent clearing its throat, stone grinding against stone in a way that is almost musical if you are very far away and very safe. Hamlet is neither. He is on the main floor of the amphitheater, dust in his teeth, following Mira through what used to be the performers' entrance, the arch above them groaning with the particular vocal quality of structures making their final decisions.

The District 4 tributes — the twins, he has been calling them that though they are not twins, a boy and a girl from the sea district who move with a coordination that suggests years of working the same nets — are already on the stage when the three of them emerge from the arch's shadow. The girl is wounded. Her partner's attention to this is the most human thing Hamlet has seen from the Career contingent in twenty-two days: the way he keeps his body angled to cover her weak side, instinctive, unperformative, the kind of habit that does not develop from training but from actual caring. Hamlet notes this with the part of his mind that notes everything and files it, the archive that does not stop running even when every other faculty is occupied with not dying.