Filed To Story: Sunrise on the Reaping Book PDF Free
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
I know every word of the song, since I learned it for Lenore Dove’s birthday last December. It wasn’t that hard, it being what she calls an earworm, meaning it sticks in your head whether you want it to or not. It’s true, the thing’s addictive, rhyming and repeating in a way that dares you to stop, all while telling you a haunting story. I sang it to her in an old house by the lake in front of a fire. We were toasting stale marshmallows and we’d skipped school, which we both caught hell for later. She said it was her favorite gift ever. . . .
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”
“What is that?”
I try to ignore Maysilee.
Merely this and nothing more.
“The thing around your neck?”
The connection has broken. Lenore Dove’s gone. I look over to find Maysilee staring at me, her eyes wide in the dark.
“Birthday present. From my girl.”
“Can I see it? I collect jewelry.”
You don’t hear that much in District 12, but Mr. Donner spoils his girls rotten. Lenore Dove told me that, on their thirteenth birthday, he gave them pure gold pins that had belonged to his mother. They’d been fashioned by Tam Amber over thirty years ago. I never saw them, but Merrilee’s featured a hummingbird and Maysilee’s a mockingjay, birds being one of the Covey’s great loves. Apparently, Merrilee wore hers all of five minutes before she lost it down a well. Maysilee threw a fit over hers, saying a mockingjay was an ugly old thing and why couldn’t Tam Amber melt it down and make her something pretty like a butterfly? When he declined, she stuffed the pin in the back of a drawer and never wore it once.
Lenore Dove saw red when she heard about the twins, feeling they neither appreciated nor deserved Tam Amber’s craftsmanship, and for a time, she spoke about breaking into the Donners’ and stealing that mockingjay pin back. Burdock and I talked her out of it. What with two recent arrests, it seemed unwise. But it still eats at her. I know she would not want Maysilee’s manicured paws on my necklace.
“It’s kind of personal,” I say. “I mean, I’m not planning on taking it off ever again. It’s not really jewelry anyway.”
She nods and doesn’t pursue it. Just hangs her washrag over the bedrail, gets under her covers, and rolls over to face the wall. I’m chilly in the refrigerated train air, so I pull up the Capitol blanket, which is stiff and has a chemical odor. Nothing like my soft patchwork quilt that Ma dries in the sunshine on Sundays, when the mine’s quiet and the soot’s minimal so it smells like fresh air. Ma . . . Sid . . .
I don’t expect to sleep, but the day’s been so draining that the movement of the train lulls me into a semiconscious state. A few hours later, I wake with a start and feel someone shaking my leg.
“Hay. Hay!” Louella whispers over Wyatt’s snores.
I prop myself up on my elbow and squint at her through the dim light. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t want Wyatt. I don’t want him for an ally, okay?”
“Wyatt? Okay, but can I know why? He looks pretty strong and -“
She breaks in. “He’s a Booker Boy. At least, his pa is.”
The Booker Boys are miners who cater to those who like to gamble in 12. They take bets on any number of goings-on – dogfights, mayor appointments, boxing matches – and organize gambling events. On Saturday nights, you can usually find them in an old garage behind the Hob, running dice and card games for a cut. If things get tense with the Peacekeepers, like the time someone set fire to a jeep, then they lay low, popping up in back alleys and condemned houses.
Personally, I never gamble. If Ma heard I’d been spending money on cards, she’d kill me, and beyond that, I just don’t get the thrill of it. Life in general seems risky enough to me. But if people want to throw away their money, it’s not my business.
“Well, I make white liquor, so I’m not one to point fingers,” I tell Louella. “We’re both operating outside the law. And doesn’t Cayson like his dice?”
Cayson’s her older brother and, when he’s not in the mines, he’s chasing some kind of pleasure.
Louella gives her head an impatient shake. “Not just dice. I mean now. I mean us.”
Then I get it. Around this time every year, a couple of Booker Boys take bets on the Hunger Games tributes. Like how old will the kids be, Seam or town, the number of tesserae they carry. The betting continues through the Games, with odds on deaths and districts and the ultimate victor. It should be illegal, but the Peacekeepers don’t care. It’s modeled on their own system of betting in the Capitol. Most of the Booker Boys shun this, it being too blackhearted, but a few make a nice profit. Those are sick and twisted people, and not the kind you can trust in the Hunger Games.
“You sure, Louella?” I ask.
“Near as I can be. I didn’t put it together until I saw Wyatt messing with that coin,” she said. “Cayson told me all the gamblers learn that stuff, to signal people there’s a game on when they can’t say so out loud.”
“He seemed to know all about stacking the deck. . . .”
“And one time, someone brought up Mr. Callow, and Cayson spit and said he didn’t have no truck with people who made money on dead kids.”
Well, Wyatt being reaped is the final word in irony. I think of the Callows frantically trying to reach him on the square. Never getting to say good-bye. Hard to feel much pity for them now. “Do you think he took bets on our reaping with his pa?”
“That’d be my guess,” she says.
“Mine, too. Booker Boys keep their business in the family. I don’t want Wyatt either, Louella. It’s just you and me. Try and get some more sleep, okay?”
I don’t, though. Around dawn, the shades retract and I stare out into unfamiliar mountains, adding insult to injury. What’s happening in my mountains? Is Hattie brewing another batch of forgetfulness? Is Ma scrubbing away her grief on the washboard, while Sid fills the cistern under a cloudless sky? Are the geese standing guard over Lenore Dove’s heart? As much pain as my loved ones feel now, how long will it be until I am just a memory?
Plutarch sticks his head in to announce breakfast in a cheerful voice that suggests yesterday never happened. We dress and go back to the sitting room car for egg and bacon sandwiches and more lemonade. Maysilee asks for coffee, a rich person drink in 12, and Tibby brings us each a cup. I don’t care for the bitter stuff.
The train climbs and climbs and suddenly we’re in a pitch-black tunnel and Plutarch says it won’t be long now, but it seems like an eternity. When we finally pull into the station, the sunlight streaming through the glass panels dazzles my eyes before I make out another train across the platform.
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