Killian // [District 11]

I've been called many things in my short, violent life. My mother named me Antony Telemachus. She was the only person to ever call me Antony - everyone else in our wilderness commune called me Tony. I never much cared for either name, or Telemachus, which I didn't learn to spell until I was a teenager. I preferred nicknames. My uncles called me Muscle once I came of age. They handed me an axe and told me which trees to clear.

It wasn't until our commune was burned to the ground that I began to explore other names, names like Killian. I'd heard it one of our village's stories, and I'd instantly liked it. That's me, I'd thought, as I never had before. Because the truth is, the quiet farm life in the secluded hills wasn't my destiny. As my family scraped together our few charred belongings, I knew we were finally on the path I was born to be on: the path of destruction.

I was fourteen when we met the first rebel. I thought her stories were like ours - completely fabricated, designed to impart moral lessons. We settled on the outskirts of Thirteen. Contrary to popular opinion, I've never actually been down into the bowels of the rebellion. I need to see the sun, to remember what I'm fighting for. Instead of an axe, they put a sword, a baton, even a taser gun into my hand and told me to fight. I was drafted before I even knew what that meant, and told to fight an enemy I didn't understand.

When I graduated at seventeen, I took on another mantle: Reaper. By then I'd lost most of my baby fat. You'd probably even recognize me. Same black eyes, dark skin, flat lips. I had a bit less facial hair, and my muscles were more rope than meat, but I was beginning to become the man standing before you. I picked Reaper to balance the scales. In the rebel's stories, they fought an old wizard who had bewitched the popular and demanded their first borns. The children went to the reaping, from there to an arena, and came home in a box. I heard the story so many times that I wanted to kill the wizard, without ever having met him. I wanted to be the person who balanced the scales.

Then, I went into a District for the first time, and everything changed. It wasn't just a story any more.

I started off in Ten, because it was near where my commune had burned down. I left my parents in the care of the rebel families, and marched alongside my adopted brothers and sisters. When we reached the district boundaries, we traded our arms for disguises. I looked older than my seventeen years, which is the only reason they allowed me on that first mission. I couldn't even pass for reaping age, else the Peacekeepers - who sounded like a cross between ghosts and the boogeyman to me - would take a special interest. I went so far as to darken my beard with ink and pad the shoulders of my jacket. I'd been told to walk, chin tucked, unassuming, until we made our hideout for the night. The next day would be the Reaping, which we would disrupt by whatever means necessary. I knew the plan. But I couldn't help myself.

I gawked at the buildings. The houses, propped up on stilts, the little shops with signs I couldn't read properly - all of it was brand new to me. Civilization. For the first time, I nursed doubt. Surely anyone who organized people to build such glorious things couldn't be evil. Perhaps foundations required the blood of teenagers to become strong.

It was my gawking that got half the squadron killed or captured. When we neared the city square, I followed my eyes instead of my instructions to the magnificent, painted door of the Mayor's home. I didn't feel the Peacekeeper tapping me on the back, first with her fingers, and then with her weapon. When she pushed me, I snapped out of my reverie and remembered my training. I punched her head so hard, her face mask shattered.

It was chaos after that. A bullet bit my bicep and a baton smashed my knee. I barely managed to crawl into an alleyway. The squadron's leader found me two days later, dehydrated and with a broken leg. He told me he wanted to leave me for dead, that ten good men and women were now jailed because of me, never to see the sun again. Three were dead. And the careful planning which had gone into infiltrating the district was now ruined. Our only hope was to return to Thirteen and regroup.

I still cannot properly describe the pain of walking those endless miles on a busted knee.

The field surgeons back in Thirteen did a pretty good job fixing me up, but they weren't plastic surgeons. My knee is a gnarled, twisted mess of scarred flesh. It reminds me - of pain and suffering, of the price for letting down my guard, of how easily the district citizens tend to violence.

The rebels put me on probation for six months. After, I begged them to place me anywhere they thought I could help. This time when I said goodbye to my parents, I knew it would be for good. I didn't need any more training, and I couldn't wait around any longer. I finally believed in the cause, more than I believed in my family or the sunlight. I was ready to sleep with a roof over my head and violent intentions in my heart. The rebels assigned me to District Eleven, supplied with a new name and identity, and left me at the fence in the midst of the first snowfall that year. A citizen friendly to our cause took me, fed and clothed me, until the snow melted and I found work in the fields.

The first time a Peacekeeper checked my identification, I learned the rebellion had aged me up two years, to spare me from the Reaping. Antony Telemachus, the card read. At least that was true, and now I've lived so long with the fake age, it sometimes feels like my real one. After all of the combat training and endurance runs, you'd have thought I found farm life boring. But for the first time in years, I found a sort of peace drawing my scythe through stalks of wheat. I felt the earth beneath my boots and the wind over the top of my shaved head, and I almost forgot why I was there.

Then came the 58th Hunger Games. Alexander Martinez and August Millory were marched into the arena - I'll never forget their names, their faces, their stories. With their fall came more than just belief in change; it was an awakening. I'd toiled alongside the good citizens of Eleven. I'd farmed and slept and ate at their sides. Not one of them had turned me in, even though I was obviously an outsider. And how were they repaid?

When I brought my righteous anger to the district rebellion leaders, they counseled patience. In retrospect, I understand their perspective. One does not collapse a regime overnight. But I was young and fueled by rage. I wanted to act. I took up the name Killian once more and left the comforts of the farmhouse. It had been my intention to smuggle reaping age children across the fence, but that winter was the harshest in recent memory. I barely survived, homeless in the district center. When the spring came, I was a ghost of my former self, thinned to bone and mottled by frostbite.

What I failed to do in the snow, I achieved under a blanket of cherry blossoms. The first girl I smuggled to the fence had the brightest blue eyes I'd ever seen. I never asked the names of any of the children I rescued; when the day comes for me to be incarcerated, I won't have anything more to tell the Capitol than this: I saved the children you condemned.

I was in the smuggling business - children and sometimes medicine and troop movement observations - for ten years. In that time, I had plenty of skirmishes with the Keepers. But I was careful, so much more careful than I'd been as a teenager. I never stayed in one place for more than a few nights, I burned my rebellion-issued identification card and crafted new ones monthly. If people knew me more than as an urban legend, they called me Killian, whose name belonged to a story none of them had ever heard. In total, I rescued close to one hundred children over the years. I'm proud of that number, more than any other. Sometimes I wonder - I hope - that they are living in the woods, in a commune not unlike the one I was born into.

A few years ago, my own number finally came up. The Keepers had fully tired of my cat and mouse game. They no longer cared if I had validated identification, and no amount of lying would persuade them. I knew I couldn't help anyone from the Detention Center, and truth be told, I'd started to recognize the limits of my abilities. I could save a few children every year, but no more than that. I had a network of friends and rebels, but I couldn't organize them. So, I did what some people would call cowardly: I disappeared. I won't tell you how or where I went - some things are best left a mystery. But since the 69th Games, I've been in hiding.

I've also been watching.

At first, I didn't dare to hope. It seemed too good to be true. Three victors in three years? Their names came to me, filtered through the layers of my hiding. Harbinger Rhodes, the gentle giant. Kirito Miristioma, who had lost his mind but not his heart. Katelyn Persimmon.

It took time for me to accept that I could hide from the Peacekeepers, but I couldn't hide from my true nature. She showed me that truth is the most powerful weapon. She, who had a voice and more power than she knew. When I returned to the district center, I found the rebels still in disguise, my networks still alive, if perhaps a little sedentary. I made my reappearance quietly, mere days before the 73rd Reaping. An old friend lent me his uniform, so that I might see her up close.

I've left Katelyn Persimmon a small token. A promise.

The resurgence is upon us.