Chapter 6: Rue and the Language of Mockingjays

The training center smells of cut grass and artificial rain.

Hamlet stands at the entrance to the botanical station and breathes it in — this engineered pastoral, this greenhouse theater with its grow-lights angled to simulate a sun that does not exist underground, its carefully arranged beds of District-specific flora arranged in labeled rows like specimens in a naturalist's cabinet. Edible. Toxic. Medicinal. The labels are in a clean Capitol sans-serif that he finds, for no reason he can immediately justify, more disturbing than the weapons rack he passed in the corridor. At least the weapons rack was honest about its function.

He has been in the training center for four hours. He has watched tributes throw spears with the casual expertise of men born to it. He has watched a girl from District 4 gut and clean a synthetic rabbit in forty seconds. He has watched the Career pack move through the stations in a loose, gravitational formation — Marcus Vane at its center, the others orbiting, each of them calculating and being calculated simultaneously — and he has carefully positioned himself at the stations most likely to produce useful knowledge and least likely to produce direct confrontation.