ivana vox ‣ D6 ‣ fin!

What you don't know can't hurt you. What you don't know. What do you know? What should you know? There's rules, so many rules. You can't break the rules. Don't you dare break the rules. You can't even think about it, my sweet.

But what will you know what they are unless you know it all?

“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“Why is the sky blue?”
“Because it likes all the other colours, but it hates blue. So it reflects it back to us.”

Professor Vox was in front of a crowd, his hair flying this way and that. He was still young and handsome, the years not quite piling up on his face. The teachers he had before him called him exuberant, a promising young student. His coworkers called him a bright man, and one that they’d take out for cheap, mulled wines until the day they didn’t have a single copper left. Then they’d sell their own shoelaces just to hear him spill out his ideas over fizzing drinks that smelled faintly of bitter tears. Sometimes, men would call him “too much,” say that all of the thoughts in his head would make him drown. A few women would try to find fault in the way his fingers were always tapping, how he must have been mentally ill in some way because he was never seen without a pen tucked into his shirt pocket.

The only thing all of these people agreed on, whether it be with rolls of their eyes or proud smiles, was that he was a thinker. A knowledge-seeker. A man with dreams that wouldn’t simply quiet, even if he ran out of ways to try and find his answers. He never ran out, not in his lifetime. For as long as there were questions to be asked, he’d be there asking them, and for as long as he had questions buzzing around his head for attention, he’d be testing them, testing himself, testing everything he knew. For these reasons, he became successful. Not successful enough to leave the District, but he was no longer just a poor man’s son. He was a speaker, giving lectures to other people who were good enough to take ideas to those who could go straight to the Capitol with them.

The thing about geniuses is that they’re dangerous. He was being closely watched, but he never knew. He was too caught up in his own quizzical world to notice when the real one kept turning around him, kept crunching up others who knew too much, could do too much, in all of its mismatched gears.

It started with a girl. Didn’t it always? A young woman, a new one, someone mysterious. They didn’t know where she came from, who she was, what she was doing in their labs all of a sudden. She was good. She did works on genetics that they’d never seen before, clapped and cheered when something was successful. She was a burning star in a sea of linoleum and sterile walls. She caught his attention, just as she was meant to do.

She deterred him from his experiments. Told him no, that was too much, you can’t do that, it just won’t work. That’s not humans were ever meant to do. You can’t know everything. You just can’t.

“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“Do you know everything?”
“No, but maybe I will.”

It worked, for awhile. They got married, and then he couldn’t focus on his amazing ideas, not like he used to. They had to focus on new things, on houses and bills and where that leak was coming from or why the oven didn’t seem to want to sit at gas mark one. There were new projects, too, things that took time, if not effort. Ones that were being dictated by the Capitol, and those always came first. Always. So he did as he was told and didn’t complain. After all, he was making more than he ever had before. He’d gone weeks without being hungry, and soon those weeks piled into months. Years, even. He had a wife. A daughter on the way. The questions would still be there in a couple of years.

That was the dangerous part. The fact that nothing quenched his thirst for knowledge, not until he could have it all. Things quieted down. The work that had to be done were in engineering. No one was interested in anything but making music sound better, screens clearer, trains faster, planes fly higher. That was all that counted. The rebuilding, the fixing, the perfecting of their technological world. He had nothing to do, studying brains and the perfect machines that they already had sitting inside of them.

Idle hands are the devil’s playthings, and he soon came up with an action. He found out how to be the know-it-all. He had finally, finally done it.

He designed the machines he would need, wrote his equations, and, the next day, found his wife’s body on the floor with poison on her breath. There was no note to say why, just another question to be answered. The last straw. The real reason he powered up his machine.

“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“Why did mommy have to leave?”
“I don’t know, Ivana.”

It went wrong. It went so terribly wrong. He should have been fine, but his brain couldn’t handle the information he poured into it, his body couldn’t hold the electricity. He wanted to know everything, but in the end, all he learned was this: You can’t know everything. No matter how much you want to.

Two days. That’s all it took. Two days to go from the Vox’s girl to become the orphan, the unwanted, the broken and confused. She had just spoken to her daddy the night before, had kissed her mama goodbye before she went to school the day morning before that. He never told her why she left, why she hurried away to somewhere she couldn’t follow. She didn’t even know what it meant, not back then. She didn’t know anything except the fact that Peacekeepers landed on her door and told her that she had to take whatever she needed and go.

She ended up at one of her father’s colleague’s houses. Quincey. Or maybe the house wasn’t actually her’s, but Marla’s, or May’s, or Jem’s, or Pip’s. It was a house bursting to the seams with women; young women, old women, women with children and women who weren’t actually women themselves, just little girls like her. She shared her room with two other girls, both older than her by years. One used spare wires to to boobytrap the doorway when they were doing their homework, and eventually everyone learned to stay out of their room altogether. The other sat on the floor and whispered to candles, hushing Ivana whenever she dared ask what she was doing.

It suited her just fine. Anywhere she could get lost in the rumble around her was just fine, actually. As long as being alive didn’t mean being present. In a house with so many people, it was easier to just watch than try to get involved. After all, every morning was a cacophony of screeches and phones, of the slick thump of bread falling butter-side-down on the wood floor. The jangle of lab passes and last minute plans as people decided who they could rely on for dinner that night, asking frantically where this report was or who in the world could have touched the tin in the fridge clearly labeled “DO NOT EAT.” She had her attic bedroom with its mattress. She had her scissors and her boxes, filled with fabric that could barely be identified as fabric. She tore them up and put them back together.

Someone told her that was what her mother used to do. She just did it with scalpels and flesh, bones and organs. She sewed up boys and girls like rag dolls and replaced their stuffing.

Not that it mattered. Her mother was gone. She had been for five years, and her father had lied when he said that they couldn’t follow. He did. Maybe he hadn’t meant to, but he did. He went ahead and left a curious little girl who wanted to create, who wanted to take broken things and make them whole again.

That became most of her life. Every morning would start with her tucking her dirty blonde hair up, up, up away from the pale cameo of her face. She’d pass the mirror without smiling, without spreading her full lips up and over her teeth - a boy had told her once that they looked like a mutt’s teeth, too square to be meant for a pretty little girl. Then she’d hurry down the stairs to go to school, to write her notes, to stay behind after class to ask her questions instead of putting her hand up when everyone else could see.

After that, she’d do whatever she could to keep from going home until it was almost quiet, more a dull roar than a symphony of shouts. Most nights she’d be out well past the sun went down. She had people to see, though she didn’t often speak more than a few words when she met with them. They just knew she was coming to check on their sons, their daughters, on their sickly cousins or their aging goat. Some people called her a little helper fairy, others called her a witch. She wasn’t sure if either were correct. After all, she only did what science told her to do. She didn’t whisper to candles when the stars lined up in a row.

She was just a little girl full of want. It seeped out through all her cracks.

A desire for the answers she never got.

And with it, a fear for what she doesn’t know.