shadowboxing { golconda

The wall of noise that presses down turbulently in this room is even more claustrophobic than the actual sloping panels trapping us within the space. I can pick out individual melodies for nothing more than a few seconds before I have to let them go again, like trying to focus on individual swirling eddies waxing and waning in a fast-moving river. There’s the sound of doors opening and closing, stainless steel panels sliding to reveal immense screens and holograms. There’s the clash of swords and the clatter of forks, almost in time with each other; the only two things they need us to do properly are fighting and eating. The former doesn’t need explanation, but the Capitol’s desire to feed us up is easy to justify. No one wants to see malnourished children, skin stretched over their bones like a drum, dying on their screens. They want to turn us into heroes, that they can paint portraits of and photograph for magazines. We’re not allowed to be haunting.

Above the metallic rhythm section, every pocket is filled seamlessly by the grunts of the fighters, the whistles of the trainers, and above even that, on another layer, blanketing over everything like a gauze, there’s the ominous hum that reminds us that this building is practically alive with energy, that a million electrical eyes observe our every movement, accompanying the fourteen or so organic ones that belong to the Gamemakers who stare judicially from their booth. The sound is, at times, unbearable. It’s there when we sleep, when we wash, when we stand alone, calculating strategy or simply suppressing our fear. I wonder if they really are trying to make us mad.

The other tributes ignore it, of course. The Peacekeepers and Avoxes seem to as well. But I have found myself more and more desperate to turn it off, turn myself off, claw that humming, groaning noise out of my ears and tug it out my head like hair from a clogged drain. I’m not the only person that’s noticed the slight tremor that’s entered my fingers when I go to thread a needle at the first aid station or attempt to pierce a pea with my fork. Thankfully, though, I’m the only person who has commented on it – and only in my own head. Paranoia has begun to loom over me like a shadow. The humming is there for me specifically – they want to stop me working on the little trinkets they know I have hiding in my room. But I won’t let them.

It’s at the corner of the gymnasium that I see the first clue towards what is, surely, the real purpose of the auditory infection that rattles in my head. The corner of the carpet here is drawn back slightly, rayed, and I can see through it to the bright flashing lights and tangles of wire like brambles, which must lie not only beneath this building but beneath the whole city. My trainer is halfway through their introduction when I become fixated with it, turning away from the station and heading unabashedly for the fault in the floor. One hand grips the pendant at my neck, feeling for the certainty of the six legs that are tucked into its metallic shell. I feel safe knowing the jewel, a mechanical scarab, is still in my possession – they haven’t realised that it’s more than an accessory yet. (Soon they’ll realise I’m more than an accessory, too).

I’m down on my hands and knees, clawing at the edge of the carpet to get a closer look at the wires below, before I even register that someone – more than one? – have followed me across the room. Thankfully I can tell simply by their posture, and the way they hang back in my peripheral vision, that they’re only another tribute. My destructive impulse, but one that will surely unlock the next piece of this challenge and finally get rid of the searing humming, hasn’t been noticed by a trainer yet. Without any concern for my own safety, I plunge my hand into the crawl space beneath the floor, feeling for some power supply, some switch – but the more I grasp around, the more I realise it’s futile.

I really am going crazy.

Resigned, I brush my newly scraped knuckles on my uniform and slump against the wall. The humming remains, infuriatingly, in the background of my thoughts, though the only ones which pass through my mind now are lethargic and slow. When I regain my motivation, my eyes drag up from the floor and come to rest on the face of the newcomer in front of me. I sit, in silence, exhausted even from this one defeat. If these apparent tests have done one thing for me at least, they’ve made me less cautious in the face of a potential threat or hindrance, less anxious to leap in before I can truly calculate a situation. Friend or foe, it’s their move.