saffron lowe. ten. pre-games resub.

She was eight years old when her father vanished.

Paige was an infant learning to crawl. Saffron was enraptured with her, the tiniest little fingers with the tiniest little nails, a streak of soft red hair atop her pale round head. The colour of fire. The colour of sunshine. "She's got hair like mine Mama!" she beamed the day it sprouted. "Like Dad!"

They were so much like their father. Still are so much like their father. Too much like him. August Lowe's daughters didn't know it then, but much like their father their sibling would be their downfall.

He'd never spoken of his brother, and neither had his wife. When they met, Caroline asked about his family and August had shrugged, "Best we don't speak of them in public." She was a wise woman, even in her youth, and knew what that meant. Trouble. Crime. Rebellion. Something neither of them wanted, nor needed, in their lives. So they built a home in the little wooden house they had been assigned, way out in the outskirts of District Ten, had a cow and a goat and a stray cat and a small plot of land - and they were happy. She baked the most wonderful things, the Lowe household filled with the smells of cinnamon and sugar and happy faces coming to collect their goods. He had a job looking after the stables a twelve-minute bicycle ride away. They were modest jobs, but they were honest jobs. Jobs for honest people who wanted nothing to do with rebellion or law-breaking or anything that August Lowe's twin brother had whispered about in the dark when they were boys.

Caroline wanted Kira and August wanted Saffron, or maybe Sparrow - and when his wife gave him that look he chuckled, eyes squinted up in his joy. Saffron Kira Lowe was born in the summer of 51 when the sun stretched itself across the sky for as long as it could. When she opened her eyes for the first time the evening sun smiled and gave her its strength, its speed, its determination. A summer child, August wrapped her up in cotton blankets and kissed the top of her head - the colour of fire. The colour of sunshine.

"Like mine," he smiled, absent-mindedly reaching for a lock of his hair - of his daughters. "Just like mine."

She was a curious child. No time to crawl, she hopped onto her knees and shuffled across the rug in their tiny living room and then when balance came to her at eleven months old she ran everywhere. A few hot tears and bandages later August and Caroline had taped up every sharp corner of their household tall enough for their daughter's head to hit, and when the gash above her ear had healed into a faint line of scar tissue she was babbling, talking, only enough energy for a few words a minute. The rest of her efforts went to her arms and legs and eyes, drinking up everything she could find. Their tiny garden became her whole world, finding little daisies in the spring time and worms squirming in the grass after a heavy rush of rain that morning.

School was difficult. She didn't care to learn about words and numbers, only enjoying the practical lessons. How to milk goats, how to feed baby calves, how to make cheese and bread in great big bowls placed on their desks. But those lessons were reserves for once, maybe twice a week, one hour at a time, so Saffron spent most of her time staring out the window longing to be dismissed for lunch. Her school friends taught her how to play hopscotch and she taught them how to climb trees. None of them were brave enough to reach the very top branch, but Saffron did it so many times she could do it with her eyes closed by the time she turned seven years old.

What lay beyond school and home called to her. From what Saffron could see at the top of the countryside school's red oak tree there were houses and horses for miles and miles, charting out a map in her head ready to explore. She hid in the tops of the tree at the start of summer, waiting for the rest of the students to fall back inside for hours of lessons, a cheeky smile on her lips as she watched from above. When the leaves were so red and vibrant she merely became one, all tanned skin and red hair, nobody spied her hiding and asked for her to come down. So when the teacher began her lesson, muffled voice floating through the opened windows of their classroom, little Saffron Lowe slowly climbed back down to the ground again with all the silence she could summon and set off on an adventure.

Seven years old and she'd made it all of fourty-five minutes out before they realised she was no longer in the classroom, in any classroom. The older student's teacher had managed to climb up half way through the red oak tree before his weight wouldn't allow him any higher, craning his neck to look for the little girl one said had climbed all the way to the top. She was not in the clouds, not on the ground, nowhere to be seen.

Keepers found her two hours later tucked up in the corner of a nearby pony stables, petting the miniature horses and feeding them hay. "I was bored, Mister Keeper sir," she explained through the gap her two front teeth had left. "I ain't care for math-a-math-ics!"

This old man, on the verge of retirement, was a kinder Keeper than most. Instead of scolding her he simply chuckled and rubbed the top of Saffron's head. "I ain't care for 'em neither," he confessed, "but your Momma's lookin' for yer, and promised me some pastries should I find ya. Come on now." She took his hand and rode on the back of one of their horses all the way home to a teary Caroline and a weary August with Paige just a bundle in their arms, Saffron still steadfast in the mindset that she'd done nothing wrong. Deep in her jean pockets lay a small boot shoe-horn, stolen from the stables she'd taken refuge in for the afternoon. She'd thought her father might like it, but the look on her mother's face told her to keep the treasure to herself, hiding it underneath her bed from thereon out.

August Lowe never spoke of his brother, but he had half a mind to guess what his twin was up to. Plans of rebellion, of an uprising, voices getting quieter - and then louder - as the odds for Ten's victory inching closer and closer together with every day that Mace Emberstatt, an orphan boy with a scowl and a sword, managed to stay alive in the icey arena of the 59th Hunger Games. August had outright refused the day his brother turned up to the stables he managed, a violent threat leaving the lips of a man otherwise kind and creative. He had a family now, said August. A new baby and a cheeky little girl who needed his guidance. Perhaps his brother would understand, mused the wiser twin, when he had children. Perhaps he would one day understand just what he was asking his brother to bargain with.

Of course, he wouldn't understand for another 15 years, long after his niece would stumble out of a maze covered in blood with one hand and twenty-three ghosts, after she'd go to the Capitol and beg for answers about August Lowe, after Myara and Emberly would die fighting for their lives and Clementa followed suit, after he started with four daughters and ended up with one. Then, only then, would he understand.

But not then. Not in the year of the 59th Hunger Games.

August Lowe left it at that. Never spoke of his brother for the months that followed, not even to his wife - but he held his breath when the Brothers, that's what they had called themselves, won battle after battle in blizzard after blizzard. He kept up at work, saw two new foals born, nursed one of them from near death back to life, kissed his wife and his girls. He was an honest man, hard-working and kind and creative, and nobody ever asked him of his brother. Nobody queried about the day he warned his brother, no "Didn't know you had a twin August", because he had made sure they were not seen together. Nobody thought to ask him of any more family when he told them of Caroline and Saffron and Paige - parents were a sore spot in Ten, hardly any still alive, and manners always trumped nosiness in conversation.

Perhaps it was his downfall, keeping his brother so far away it was if he didn't exist. So much of his life had been spent painting over his mirror image that he didn't ever think he would be mistaken for his treacherous, law-breaking, rebelling, outcast brother.

"Gideon Lowe," barked the Keepers on an autumn evening, guns pointed at August stood at his letterbox, not a shred of a Ten drawl to their voices to be heard. "You're under arrest for treason-"

"What-?"

"- betraying the sacred laws of Panem-"

"- listen, you've got the wrong ma-"

" - and attempt to -"

"August?! What's going o-"

"- get the kids insi-"

" - inciting rebellio-"

"- I HAVE A BR-!"


On the television screen Mace Emberstatt stood in the snow surrounded by bodies and blood, a canon fired, and August Lowe was never to be seen again.

She was eight years old when her father vanished. Momma didn't stop crying for days on end. The old retired Keeper who'd fetched her from the stables visited, paid his respects, held her mother's hand and said "There ain't nothin' I can do, Caroline, I'm terribly sorry" and Saffron went quiet. Too quiet.

She didn't speak for days on end. School was out of the question for a while. So she stumbled through fields and lakes and tiny clusters of trees and sobbed silent tears, desperately looking for her father, running back home before the sun kissed the horizon goodnight. Months passed, as did the seasons, and Mace Emberstatt brought them more food than she'd ever had in her life but none of it mattered because her Dad was gone, the truth with him, and her Momma was shaky and barely ate and baby Paige howled into the night none the wiser.

They were kinder to her when she went back to school. Not that it mattered. They tried to get her to speak up in class, concentrate a little, shifted her desk from the window to the front of the room. But Saffron just sat there day-dreaming, wandering home as she kicked up dirt in worn-down shoes, stopping at all the run-down houses and abandoned shells of shops or rusted machines or dried-up watering wells. She became selfish, keeping her words and her sister and her life and her treasures to herself. Years passed, and the days got longer, and the food got smaller again and she barely grew two inches by the time she was twelve years old but being tiny allowed her to sneak into places she shouldn't, filling up the hole her father had left with trinkets and things that didn't belong to her.

Paige got older, but she took her time with life. She learned to shuffle, then crawl, then walk on her own time. She focused on lots of sounds at once, talked clearly and coherently, she looked at the bigger picture. She could read, write, process things faster, with more detail. She had a smart mind - smarter than her sisters. She was cautious, like their parents, worried about getting in trouble with anyone. Paige was all the wise, and Saffron all the wild.

The youngest child of August was far too scared to join Saffron on her expeditions but she waited on the back porch every evening, watching the tiny blur of her sister running through the sunset-kissed hills get bigger and bigger and bigger. Every night, as they lay in their beds, Saffron would flick on her borrowed torch and pull out the box underneath her bed and show Paige what she'd found that day, describe the eerie skeletons of rusted tractors in abandoned fields and rotting woods of bedrooms long since abandoned by little girls like them. Every detail, every secret, Paige would keep - so that if she too vanished, at least her secrets would stay alive with her sister.

When her name was called at fourteen, Saffron took a breath and stepped forward.

Her secrets were safe, at least for a little while, with Paige.