The 1st Annual Hunger Games

[L△LIA]

Despite the commanders of the rebellion having been killed or captured, lined up in front of firing squads or locked away for extensive questioning, it still didn't feel like punishment enough. If the soldiers of those treasonous forces had been afraid of their own deaths then they wouldn't have taken up arms. Instead they would have stayed behind with their families, with their husbands, their wives... their children.

Defeat was not enough. The traitors needed to feel true regret, the kind that would be passed down from generation to generation and never be forgotten.

"In penance for their uprising, each district shall offer up a male and a female between the ages of twelve and eighteen." The announcement of the Treaty of Treason was made only weeks before the first Hunger Games was set to take place. It was a public declaration that the war was over, as if it were a simple thing with a simple end. While the president's speech was taking place, airing on every television across Panem, the most stubborn of rebel forces were still refusing to surrender — even in the wake of the bombs that had decimated District Thirteen. Unacceptable. "These tributes shall be delivered to the custody of the Capitol and transferred into a public arena, where they will fight to the death until a lone victor remains," President Imperiosa Ironsquall's voice implied that this was a reasonable punishment, something she considered merciful, "henceforth and forevermore this pageant shall be known as The Hunger Games." Perhaps if the rebels had known better when to stop, these lengths wouldn't have been necessary.

A special council handpicked a list of twenty-four names, each one a carefully chosen punishment. They were the sons and daughters of terrorists, of mayors, and of turncoat government officials who looked the other way when they should have been remembering their loyalties. Some of the names were rebels themselves, schoolchildren foolish enough to think themselves revolutionaries. Others were ordinary citizens who hadn't done anything except cower at the idea of bombs and gunfire, the kind of names that implied that this Reaping was random and wasn't purely intended to punish rebel soldiers. Then again... no revenge could be sweeter than forcing traitors to weigh their life directly against those of the very people they swore they were willing to die to protect.

Not yet wanting to gather large crowds of an unsettled populace together, all citizens were restricted to their homes for the televised announcement of the Reaping. Peacekeepers stormed the streets, breaking down doors as names were announced and school photographs flashed on screen. Most children were seized and taken away with little more than a moment's warning, but others had been captured directly from the battlefield, weeks earlier.

Life as they knew it was about to change, just not in the way most of them had hoped.