WIP :: Three :: Nihil 'Nevada' Roach

namednihil roach nevada; codename: the girl
agedsixteen
locateddistrict three
presentedfemale
orientatedheterosexual
biography

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Once upon a time, I was a girl with a name, and a family, and a future. I know, I can barely believe it either. The name was Nihil, which I pronounced Nee-il but every stranger thought had a hard 'h' sound, making it harsher and even more unbearable than it already was. I knew boys called Neil, dads, uncles, but no other girls. It's because my grandmother used to be a professor at a school in our area of District Three, teaching Ancient World Studies. Nihil means 'nothing' in some old language (but of course my parents didn't know that when they named me) and I suppose they thought it might impress her. That was their way - my mother and father. Always seeking to impress, always doing what was best for them, and not for anyone else. Their personalities matched their jobs, which required total devotion to hysterical extremes, and which they've been doing as long as I can remember. Indeed, Panem's film business wouldn't be what it is today without their input. Reaping films, parade shorts, (all the propaganda a happy citizen could ever wish for). Now, it makes me sick - that my mum and dad were part of the team of adults responsible for indoctrinating and brainwashing adults and children across the continent - but then I didn't understand. To me, they were heroes, spreading only truths, displaying the glory of our great Capitol and its forces in the most vivid way possible. I only thought like that because I didn't know any better, though. It's so important to look at every side of a situation before acting, or who knows what sort of trouble you could end in? I could go and sit with the officials in the front rows of the Reaping - with Victors close enough to touch - and watch, radiant with pride, as my parents' creations glowed on the screens above.

I was nine the first time I learnt there was a different world - a better world - to the one my mother and father exhibited to the nation. I only learnt how it happened later (much later) but it was still clear enough at the time what was going on. Dad had gone away, to this event or that conference or those Peacekeeper rallies, and I was in my room whilst mother did some editing next door. I loved the old projector my parents used at home, so unlike the hi-tech ones in the Square of such an electronically advanced district. the way it thumped and hummed as it spun, lights inside waxing and waning as the translucent film flitted past. Artifacts like that, decades old, spark a passion in me; they're keys to another world in the past, even though in reality they're just an echo of what life was like before all this technology. I've heard stories about District Thirteen, where it's said the people live in holes in the ground and have no mechanisms except ones from before the Rebellion. In my eyes, that's what paradise is.

Mum was cutting pieces of film together, I could hear her working. The clatter of film canisters, the clean slice of her delicate scissors, the groan of the cement gun as she carefully re-edited her work. Often, she'd put bits of footage father had taken amongst her own. They were a team - two angles on the same event, two halves of an important conversation - and they used each other's work as they pleased. For an average nine year old, I was smart, but it wouldn't have taken a genius to see that that was what real love was. However, real love clearly wasn't enough to stop my mother from doing what she did next. All I felt was a change in mood in the house, but even that was enough to know something was wrong. I'm good at that: instinct. From next door, the whirring and snipping was replaced by a much more guttural, human sound. Slowly, starting somewhere in the base of her chest, a moan erupted from my mother, full of horror. I was too afraid to move, as curious as I was. And that was a wise decision - for I don't know what would have happened if I was there when her dumbstruck pain became rage.

Father didn't even have time to ask what was going on when he got home because the Peacekeepers had already arrived to take him away. I sat upstairs, playing my part of the perfect, silent daughter effortlessly, because I understood that nothing would get better if I tried to help either party. I used to think I was incapable of changing anything, but now I know that I just never had the strength.

[/i] There was a fight downstairs - dad is where I got my viciousness from - but, naturally, the Peacekeepers won. I knew how likely it was that I would never see him again. That night, whilst mother wept in her bed alone, I tiptoed into the projection room, where the cause of my father's capture was still sitting in the machine. All it took was a few clicked switches and a rewind of the tape to find the incriminating evidence. I watched the film in silence, bored by the reptitive slogans and 'heroic' action shots. I was never likely to follow in my parents' Capitol-worshipping footprints. Then I snapped back to attention as the mood of the film changed. Fire. The previously light and glorious atmosphere of the film, giving way to a darker series of stills of burning flags, suffering miners and over and over again: Down with the Capitol! Abolish the District System! Burn them to the ground! My wide brown eyes widened and for a moment I felt the horror that mother must have felt seeing this for the first time, too. Dad was an honest man, on the surface - Capitol-fearing, a loving father and husband, devoted to his work. We would never have guessed that underneath that he was a secret revolutionary. Not even I, with my acute sense of a person's true intentions and my direct judgement, had any idea. And that was a terrifying thought.

The second revelation occurred in my second week of secondary school, when I was eleven. I hated my classes, my teachers and my peers. I was more mature than any of them. Two boys round the back of the school, sniggering and whispering and, when I found them, hunching over a plain white box with shaking hands. My curiosity got the better of me, as it always did, and I crept closer. The box slid open cleanly, revealing a parcel wrapped in paper with a black logo on it. And when the paper was unwrapped... two needles, and a holographic card that said "Everything is perfect" in bold, black letters. Usually, I'm quite good at suppressing memories I don't want to keep. It's a skill I've refined because it's been an obligation, rather than a choice, because of the terrible sights I've seen throughout my life. However, the image of the two boys rolling up their sleeves and tying shoelaces around each other's upper arms to make the veins stand out is something I'll never forget. I stayed hidden in the shadows, paralysed by my intense horror and unable to move, watching as they slipped the needle in, right to the base, and injected the twin shots into their bloodstreams. Only when they slumped against the walls with dilated pupils and hearts beating so strongly I could watch the pulses in their necks throbbing and fluttering, did I dare to say anything. "Where can I get some of that?"

The teenagers had no trouble with telling an eleven year old girl where to get a hit. I should thank them for that, really, but it disgusts me all the same. Now that I am where I am, and the youngest one here, I've begged my leaders never to take in any kids younger than me. Children deserve a proper childhood, something I never had, and that's a rule I'll stick by my whole life. Corruption of youth is a dispicable and unforgivable crime.[/i] It was partially my fault, because of my ability to make myself look harmless and trustworthy. By batting my long, dark eyelashes and raising my even darker eyebrows, I posed no threat to these boys. How could someone so innocent and believable want to report them to an authority? It seemed impossible. As well as that, I'm small and skinny for my age - and they knew as much as I did that they could easily get me back if I told anyone, and they weren't the sort of boys who would protest against hitting a girl. They gave me an address, a time and a code word, and I've kept them in my memory ever since.

For the next two years, I never managed to pluck up the courage to find the meeting point. Once or twice I lingered around it to check it was the right place - marked by an identical symbol to that on the white box scribbled in chalk on a wall - and whilst there I watched a man come up, face in shadow, and wait for any potential customers. But I was still too young. Too young to get away with it. The time finally came when I was thirteen - my third encounter. Recently, more and more kids had been zoning out at school, and excusing themselves in pairs or threes. Only I noticed where they all seemed to be going, and only I noticed the vacant smiles on their faces when they returned. It was the sort of sign I had been looking for. That afternoon, at the time I had been told, I too excused myself, grabbed my bag and set off for the meeting point. I have a talent for navigating, retracing my steps, so it didn't take long to find the little chalk drawing again. When I reached the spot, there was no one there, and all that was left to do was wait.

I heard the dealer before I saw him, and his voice was like something out of a nightmare that little kids have. I never had nightmares until after I met him, so I guess he was the source, and I can't use that analogy personally. "Got a codeword?" he asked, speaking as though every syllable sent a jolt of pain through his system. It came from somewhere deep inside him, part whine, part wheeze - all pain and fear and cold, emotionless duty. This was a man who had been shaped by what he was doing for a long time. That voice, along with the stench of vomit, stale sweat and decay wafting from him gave me shivers. Even now, when I'm no longer afraid of the Bogey Man, that mental image of this faceless dealer makes me lose my wits. And when I turned round to look at his face, well, that was the biggest surprise of all.

It took my eyes some time to adjust to the darkness underneath the hood of his grey jacket, and when they did his face was so close a colour to the garment that covered it that I almost didn't believe he was human. Even at that age, I didn't need to deduce anything profound in order to see that his hollow cheeks and trembling, crusted lips only betrayed his ill health further. This was a man with Death, for in my mind it is a very concrete entity,[/i] digging its talons deep into his shoulder. It was clear that his demand for a codewor would require me to lean in and whisper, and indeed it was a phrase so obscure that it was sure to attract some attention if I spoke it aloud. At first, I was rigid with fear, just as I had been when I watched the two shooters, but after dragging my feet forwards, there was another reason why immobility struck me.

That dark, fine hair that escaped from the hood; those straight, thick eyebrows; those low and rounded cheekbones; his slightly downturned lips and heavy jaw; it all seemed so familiar. But he didn't just remind me of anyone - He reminded me of me.

I took a few moments to look beyond the layers of age and rot on his face, and beyond the blocks in my own memory, but by the time I had confirmed that this invalid was who I thought he was, he had made the connection himself. A choked gasp- no, a death rattle played in reverse- escaped his throat and he fell to his knees before me. "Nilly..." his voice reflected the violent shaking of his limbs, and the gurgle of pooled liquid at the back of his ruined throat, as he used the nickname that strictly only my parents could ever use. I took a step back from him as he made a grab for the slack fabric in my jeans, always too loose on my skinny frame. This man may look like my father, sound like him too (if I tried hard enough to hear it) but it couldn't be him. He had been executed, facing the brutal and sadistic fist of Panem Justice, hadn't he?

The decrepit old man at my feet took my horrified silence as confirmation that I would, and that I could, help him, and proceeded to explain to me how he had got where he was. I still didn't believe that he could be my father, and so his story sounded exaggerated and fictitious as he narrated it between violent coughing fits; but now, having seen what I've seen, I realise that anything is possible concerning the corruption of our government, and his account wasn't so unbelievable after all.

From the moment he was dragged, screaming, from our home, my father knew that there was something different about these Peacekeepers. The way they glanced behind them to check they weren't being followed, or stopped and blocked their prisoner from view whenever another patrol went past, it all seemed to show that the lawmen, if that's what they truly were, had something to hide. They had been walking in silence for around ten minutes when they came to a stop, next to what looked like one of the generator sheds that dotted the Battery City. Two sharp raps on the door proved that its appearance certainly was deceiving. Dad's account was nowhere near as fluid as I am retelling it now, and was frequently interrupted by his hacking cough. Nevertheless, I listened attentively, absorbing every detail; a plan was already forming in my head. Father and his abductors descended down a spiral staircase and walked along a corridor - which the prisoner probably assumed was simply the way to the Detention Centre. Likewise, when the walkway opened out into a changing room, and he was commanded to strip down to be washed and searched, it simply seemed like another procedure. The truth only began to emerge after this part of the ordeal was finished.

The Peacekeepers left my father in the care of two men wearing identical grey uniforms, who dressed and handcuffed him before escorting him through a larger complex of rooms. When they arrived at one of them, dad was bidden to sit and wait. He used the time to look at his surroundings, although everything was the same; off-white furniture, perfectly synchronised clocks, a mirror on the opposite wall and a single potted shrubbery, and all of it immaculately, disturbingly, clean. Finally, the sound of air rushing in marked the arrival of another through the heavy metal door, and a bald man whose grey robes had only a black collar to differentiate them from the escorts' sat opposite the prisoner. Here, father shuddered, as if this man featured in more than one memory from the story. He spoke with a high, sharp voice, as clean and plain as his environment, to my dad. "I am Agent Pegasus of Better Living Industries. I'm not here to punish you for your crime, but to offer you absolution from it. Accept what I am about to offer you, and you will be pardoned of your treason and will work under our protection for the rest of your life. Decline, and we will pass you on to our... less forgiving brothers, and your execution should quickly follow." His words were blunt, and effective. Dad agreed, no questions asked. With a curt nod, Agent Pegasus began to explain. "For a long time now, my Association has been aiming to improve the quality of life for our fellow District Three citizens. With our beloved Hunger Games never far away, mourning and misery are everpresent. I'm sure that you at some point have been affected, albeit secondarily, by the effect of this event. The truth, as we have discovered it, is that these feelings are entirely unnecessary - simply surface layers that, when exfoliated, reveal a new, blank skin which is unharmed. Our aim is to preserve this "skin", as we put it, using this." My father glanced down and realised that, during the speech, the bald man had placed a small rectangular box between them on the table. I didn't even need to listen to his description of its logo, I knew what it must be. "We, the organisation, believe that the human mind is worth more than the lack and blue body which may hold it, with its white lips and red-rimmed eyes. We firmly believe in the sanctity of monochromaticism, and this little gift is what will bring this to our citizens. And your job, my friend?" the agent-cum-salesperson raised his eyebrows and smiled almost warmly, "simply to oversee the equal distribution of this life support throughout our City."

I swallowed as I watched my father's face grow ashen, and the light which had momentarily filled his eyes as he narrated his story in such precise detail dissipated. This was it. The big catch in this too-good-to-be-true offer. My father had to donate his body to the drugs trade, on condition of death. A mule. "What... could I do, but accept?" he murmured quietly. It felt like someone was holding their fist in my trachea, and I had to force myself to swallow around its solid mass. He tried to spare me the details, but (and this makes me bitter now) curiosity was starting to get the better of me. I imagined his daily routine, pouring liquid into latex packets and forcing these down his own throat, travelling in silence through the rings of the District, from the industrial center to the far out Wastelands, stopping at every meeting point to sell his wares. I wondered at which point he realised that the work would kill him. My eyes were as wide as they could go, my dry lips slightly parted, and then the horror of the story hit me. It was so long ago, but he retold every detail as if it was happening right in front of him. Out of all the sights he must have seen, that was the most vivid - or just simply the one he could handle the most.

Then I knew that I had to get away from him. It wasn't safe for me to get involved with 'Better Living Industries', and it certainly wouldn't help him to know that his daughter knew he was still alive, to give him that hope of salvation. However, before I could turn and run, he seized my wrist tightly, (just like he did when I was still a rebellious child, rejecting punishment for my actions). "No!" he cried as I struggled, "you don't understand! If... I make an unsuccessful sale... it ends my contract... please! You have to buy this from me." It was with nothing short of vile repulsion that I spun back towards him, forced to watch as he produced his goods for me.

I first realised something wasn't right when he held up the string of small latex spheres and they were smeared red with blood. Still down on his knees, where he had stayed since he collapsed when he recognised me, his fingers, thin like mine had always been, clenched and unclenched around the product, and he absorbed what it meant. "N-" his denial started, but was interrupted by a hideous, wet fit of coughing. Blood erupted from his mouth, onto the parcel in his hands - more than I thought was possible. I was rooted to the spot, glancing once round the still-empty streets and then back, fixated, on my father. His chest heaved and his back arched as he braced himself with one hand against the dust of the earth. "N-" he tried once again, and was no longer able to hold himself up. The dirt resettled in droplets as he collapsed, thick with vomit and blood.

As he died, as the last wet breath left him limp, he stared up at me. It wasn't hate, or a plea for help- it was almost as if he didn't want to die alone. Almost as if, with the final consonant that he uttered, he wasn't trying to reject his fate, but to say my name one last time.


That was the moment I realised two things. One was that, when Better Living Industries, whatever it really was, clocked that one employer hadn't checked out at the end of 'shift', they were going to come looking for him. The other was that, if they found his corpse abandoned which they inevitably would (perhaps shaved bald or missing a few back teeth, because I didn’t think he’d have anything of real value on him), they'd need to find a new employee to take his place. I had the choice to walk away then, and pretend that nothing had ever happened at all; but I think the idea that the memory would affect the way I behaved and thought terrified me even more than the source itself. So I steeled myself, for all the effort that took, turned from the corpse of the man I no longer knew, and stepped into the next chapter of my existence.

Now, I'm nothing like the girl who went searching for a secret door with only a deluded man's memory as her compass. I'm taller, and thinner, too - but stronger and quicker. My tresses are the texture of horsehair, which I dye a bright yellow in protest of my need to always be invisible. According to government records, I don't exist. The status of missing-presumed-dead is heavy with disadvantages. I rarely ever get to go out during the day, so my eyes are sensitive and squinty, and my skin is practically transluscent. I was never the sort of girl to blush prettily, but now even my ruddiness has faded. Nevertheless, I have good health and a good brain - as sturdy as it can get with all I've been through up to now.

My priorities in life have changed now, too. I don't care about myself as much - I don't make a fuss about my name or my appearance. In fact I chose a whole new personality for myself when I finally found Better Living Industries, an was admitted to what looked like the very room my father described. I gave them a new name for myself: Nevada. It rolls off the tongue better than Nihil ever did, and is striking enough that people never ask for a surname. It's important that I stay hidden
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other
face claimemma jones
palette¡viva la revolución!
songapocalyptic renegade
plotkilljoys
codewordodair