cold war. terra, seventh.

[✨ zozo.]

civil blood .

"What about Cordelia?"

The officials look at each-other nervously, shifting in their seats at Terra's dining room table. It's just a moment, but Terra catches it. Funny how sharp your eyes get when your hearing's gone.

She sees a pulse at their necks, throbbing - she can almost feel the vibration from across the way.

Precautions, their lips say, in place.

Terra just looks at them, long and hard. A beat of sweat sneaks down one's neck behind his ear, clean-cut and shaven for the cameras. The victor takes a long, hard sip of the ice water in front of her, trying to remember what the clinking of cubes in glass sounds like.

She doesn't offer a drink to either of them. District Ten manners be damned.

"Like what?" she asks.

...classified.

"Then I'm bringing this with me," she replies, setting her glass down hard on the table and picking up the fork she's kept in her pocket for three hundred and sixty-four days. Her good luck charm, still as shiny and new as the rest of the cutlery she left on the train cart from the Sixth Games.

The two hesitate, look at each-other again, sigh. Shrug.

Okay, their lips say.

She catches the start of what could she do with a- before they get up from their seats, the end of -be surprised as chairs scrape the birchwood floor.

Not that she can hear it.

Not that they can see her slip a matching knife into her boot, bending down to tie her shoelaces, then following them out the door to the truck waiting for the three of them at the gates of the Victor's Village.

Ringing, ringing, ringing.

Terra smiles.

table by elegant.

[✨ zozo.]

disguise .

It's nice, this disguise. Dark hair, it had faded slightly since Babe had pasted her hair with dye in the Capitol bathrooms. Her roots had grown in, an obnoxious streak of gold, and then she had refused to open her next padded envelope until someone from the Capitol dropped off extra boxes and an instruction manual. Claimed it helped with their projects, blonde hair splayed across banners - nobody expects a brunette in the dark to slit their throat.

And she finds she can move about Ten more freely now, walking down the hill of the village to what's left of the town square she once knew. The shells of buildings bowled down to make room for petroleum tanks and truck parking, rows upon rows of metal machines, glistening puddles of oil strewn everywhere. The odd shop, the odd market, people struggling to make ends meet. She wanders through the storefronts, boots splashing in the rainbow shimmers after a rainy spring morning, she smiles at the people that hand her goods in exchange for an endless supply of coin that turns up in bags on her doorstep like clockwork on Tuesdays.

They used to shy away, close their doors, twist signs from open to closed. Now they gladly do business with the quiet brunette dressed in a brown leather jacket, thinking nothing of her.

Only sometimes do they squint, double-take at her appearance - but by that time Terra is long-gone, the tolling of a shop bell she cannot hear the only thing left to suggest she was ever there in the first place.

And secretly, quietly, she likes this disguise most of all because it separates her from Cordelia Blake. Lethal blondes, one after the other, she rinses her hair out in the claw bathroom upstairs to rid herself of their likeness. Stained water streaking porcelain, sucked down the drain. Terra looks at the girl with damp, dark hair in the mirror and exhales through her nose.

I'm not like her, she tells her reflection. I'm not like her.

The knife hidden in her boot says otherwise.

table by elegant.

[✨ zozo.]

witness .

The woman on the train back, mid-winter sun already long gone, looks down at her as they speed away from District Six.

// you're getting sloppy, the translator prompts. Her expression says the rest.

Terra heaves, exhausted, and throws the blood-stained blade to the train carriage floor. The woman is right. A different face each night, one to escort her there. Another to escort her back. Sometimes masked, sometimes bare-faced. All with that same look in their eyes, like they'd rather be anywhere but here - in a locked carriage with a girl from Ten who could snap their necks in a heartbeat.

But this one is different. There's a hardened glare in her eyes, one that only comes from war. She has the ego, the swagger, that comes from a victory.

And she's right - Terra is getting sloppy. She hadn't heard the son open the bedroom door, the flare of light spilling out to swallow up her shadow the only indication that something had gone extremely amiss. That she'd forgotten something. Made a wrong calculation.

She's in District One again, on the stage. Microphone. Neck in a chokehold. Twist --

the look of horror on his face.

But she'd thrown the knife. Winced as it landed in the child's chest. No mess. No evidence. And certainly no witnesses.

And then she'd closed her eyes, breathing in the metallic rot of the blood pooling from his father's neck, so she didn't have to witness the way the little boy gasped - pain she could not hear. Didn't make it any easier to bear.

Count to five, ten, twenty. Thirty, sixty, one hundred. Opened her eyes, his own still wide and filled with terror.

Little Terror wrenched the knife from his now-still heart and slipped out of the window, leaving Terra and her ghosts in the dark.

table by elegant.

[✨ zozo.]

exile .

They avoid District One altogether this year, instead sending the fittest of their soldiers to her. She teaches them what she knows and they teach the children back home - it's safer this way. The Capitol cannot risk their asset in such volatile environments.

Environments where Cordelia Blake resides.

She sends them off with a wave, back to their shiny facilities and pretty weapons and dirty money. The next morning she returns from a stroll around Ten to a mark sprayed in red on her front door that can only mean one thing: she is now, finally, truly, alone.

In exile, alone. Free. Unbound to The Circle.

A tear slips down her cheek. Whether it is relief or mourning, Terra cannot quite decide.

table by elegant.