When I step onto the stage in District Five, completely alone, my heart sinks. 

There is Wyatt's family, standing on their own podium, staring. A mother with the same complexion as him rocks a baby gently in her arms. It looks close to tears, yet with a muffled shh sound from her, it is calm. 

I wonder what that baby will think, growing up knowing that its brother died so long ago, under such abnormal conditions. I wonder if one day, when I'm much older, I will see this little human all grown up, talking about its older brother and what he could have been if his death hadn't been quite so premature. 

A little boy clutches his father's left leg, a girl who seems a bit older on his right. 

I look away. Nicola's father wraps an arm around her mother's shoulders, pulling the frail woman closer towards him. 

My gaze strays up into the clouds, where it is safe. I recite my speech, the entire thing prewritten. I've spent hours memorizing it on the train between stops, and yet, there is no feeling of satisfaction when it is over and I bow my head yet again, stepping back from the dais respectfully. 

I don't look at Wyatt's family when I leave, but I do wonder. I remember the boy he was when I spoke to him that night in the arena, a night that feels so long ago yet also like yesterday. I imagine how good of a family he must have had to reach that level of kindness. 

I imagine how they must feel now that he is gone. 

But then I remind myself that I don't have to imagine, that once I was the little girl standing on the podium, tears running down my cheeks as I watched the much-older boy proclaim lies about my sister. He looked right at me once during his entire speech, his gaze scanning my face, and in the moment I had been terrified--this boy was a murderer! He had taken my sister from me, and now he was out for me too, to finish off the deal! I spent that night curled under the sheets, sleepless, terrified of my impending assassination. 

But now I know how he felt. Because I am scanning the face of Wyatt's brother just as Salacia's murderer did me, looking for any little similarity, any hint that all of him is not dead. That some of him survived, at least in the face of another. 

The train rolls away, past long strains of grassland. 

We enter District Six. I make another speech, avoid looking at the families of Tiberius and Freiya, two tributes I did not know well enough to make any sort of assumptions about, or even to memorize their faces, to recognize them in their kin. 

And then again, I am gone, trees enveloping the windows of the train, rushing all around us until I'm sure we are going to crash into one, yet we don't. We land in Seven, the lumber District. 

I walk up to the podium. Their tributes were Oakley and Tupelo.

"Oakley, I didn't know," I start, "but she survived for so long in the Games, that I think it's safe to say that she was strong, a girl with a fighting spirit that didn't let down, up until the very end."

I did not see Oakley's very end. I was not there. I tuned out during the recap they made me watch after the Games. But her family doesn't need to know that--because there is her mother, arms crossed over her chest, nodding her head softly. She looks mournful, yet accepting. Her eyes are red with tears yet unshed. 

"It... can also be said that Wyatt, the male tribute from District Five, was not in his right mind," I continue, "and had she been put against a more sane opponent, I truly do believe she would have bested them. From what I saw of her in the training center and early in the Games, she certainly could have bested me."

"Play it humble," Coira reminds me, her voice ingrained deep into my head. "Make them think you care."

"I do care," I had responded, but she didn't believe me. It took me a few hours, but as I was laying in bed that night, trying to fall asleep, I realized she might have been right. 

I finish my Oakley speech after a few more sentences of being humble and subtly insulting everyone possible without it being noticeable. It's not on purpose, of course--but the Games are such a sensitive topic, it's almost impossible to draft a speech above five minutes without offending anyone. I stopped having Coira review my speeches a long time ago, because she would send them back half-empty, full of major revisions and deductions, most I didn't agree with at all. 

Then, I turn over to Tupelo's family, jumping slightly when I see his brother staring at me, his eyes piercing through my soul. They are blue, but they might as well be red, the laser of a sniper's gun pointing right at my forehead. 

Tupelo's brother looks like his finger is firmly on the trigger, and he is ready to take the shot. 

I look away, refusing to meet his gaze. I did not kill Tupelo. Terra did. I am not to blame. 

"Tupelo was..." I hesitate in my attempt to look over at his family once again, to scan the faces of the rest of his family members. They blur out in the violence of his glare. "He was..."

I look away, once again using the clouds above as a distraction. "Tupelo was the first person I ever saw die."

This is not on script. My speech, although not Coira-edited, was very much picked through, everything slightly off-putting removed quickly. 

But does it really matter? I mean, what do I have left to lose? Nothing. Snow can take my life and my father, that is all--and I have no business caring for either of those things. 

And yet, he could also take Aeolus or Altalune, the two people in this world I hold dearest, and that would hurt far more. 

"I won't deny that I had a part in his death," I continue, because I did. My countless nights of guilt towards those murders I stood by and watched, an unwilling accomplice, are an easy reminder. 

"Terra shot the arrow, but I stood back and let it happen. I could have rushed forward and attempted to save him, and I didn't."

I look at the boy again, him with his intense stare, his angry eyebrows. He looks around my age. 

I meet his gaze as I say the next part. "And I would like to express my utmost remorse for that inaction. He was a perseverant person who would have gone places. He did not deserve such an early death."

He doesn't look away, so neither do I. And when I speak again, this time I don't stutter. "Tupelo was ruthless, but in the Games, that trait is nowhere near negative. I am not as ruthless, which you all know. I wouldn't have been surprised if he stood here, instead of me."

A pause. The crowd is silent. What I've said isn't new, but it lingers on the line before, a hairsbreadth away from crossing. 

"That's all," I say, my voice uncharacteristically quiet. 

Tupelo's brother looks away, but I don't. I stare the entire time as I am pulled away by Peacekeepers, my obedience still just as present. 

The train door whirs closed, leaving me with a head full of a speech I memorized for no reason, and a boy I think may want me dead.