fin // peacekeeper // gilead

My childhood was the dry taste of dust, the sweet smell of freshly rotting fruit, and the painful brightness of sunlight pounding on stagnant pools of water. We were poor, sure, but in the way we lived we were perhaps richer than all the others who lived in the city, far away from us. They say that the things you own eventually own you, so the truth, then, is that in our poverty, we were the freest we would ever be - that I would ever be again. We children ran in a pack, like scuff-kneed, greasy-haired wolves, and oftentimes we really would become those creatures, howling at the moon and play-fighting in the mornings before the heat got too much for our near-burnt golden skin. The pack revered you if your adult teeth had already pushed through your dirty gums like spring roots, and rejected you if you were too scared to jump the stinking, stinging river that carried all the city's waste away from it. I made that leap when I was only eight years old, and earned my place amongst the other boys. I still bear the raised goosebump scars of the acidic water as it splashed around my legs, like pale tree-stumps amongst the bristly undergrowth that covers the rest of my darkly tanned calves. I was a small child - even now I'm still dwarfed by the people around me - and so that rite of passage made me, with my short skinny legs, more nervous than the others. However, I knew that because of the circumstances surrounding me in particular, my family name and history, it was increasingly important for me to prove that I was more than just the reputation that hung on my name.

In my eyes, my father had always been brilliant, in the visual sense of the word as much as the metaphorical. A true-born leader, he inspired love and courage in everyone around him, and he was all I could ever aspire, and will ever aspire, to be. He shined like a comet, and was awaited and regarded with the same reverence, and so the first time he came home from a long city excursion donning the suit of gleaming white armour I would later come to know so intimately, all it did was add to the blindingly glorious aura that already surrounded the man. For years before he gained the title officially, he acted as the peace-keeper of our community. The meetings he called, passing a bag of feathers around the leaders of every household as a summons - white goose's for good news, black crow's for bad - were the only ones known to get definite conclusions which everyone was satisfied with. And there was no shortage of conflicts for him to put his beautiful, logical mind to solving. In some ways, I'm grateful that I got my first tastes of criminal men, turned sour with disillusioned ideas of honour or justice and thus also turned to violence, before I settled into my profession. I have since seen others around me crushed under the sheer stubborn force this kind of man can wield when they think their superiority is threatened by a figure of authority. I suppose my father taught me most of what I know about other people in the years before he completed his training. There was one other man, of course, without whom I probably would not be alive today, but his entrance into my story comes far later than my childhood, and so he will be introduced in good time.

I knew that the armour that brought my father amongst our people as a leader also set him apart, and that one day it would be the reason that he would have to leave us for good. Peacekeepers, of course, weren't allowed a family - or any partialities at all - and my father was extraordinarily good at separating himself from us when duty required it. In some courses of my life, perhaps it would have been better if I had inherited that trait, but I am wholly glad I didn't. I find that understanding people and the motives behind their actions often makes them much easier to predict. For my father, his lack of empathy was, eventually, his downfall in our community - but perhaps for similar reasons it was my surplus of empathy that caused the downfall of my own. There was no shortage of dominators amongst the adults around me, who held themselves not like lions but like peacocks, comparing what I knew were ultimately insignificant material things to conclude on who was the boldest or the best. My father took no part in these ritualistic displays, teaching me by example about the wealth of truth, and skill, instead, and I have taken the message to heart since. To others, his regulatedness was interpreted as insolence, and over the years bitterness rose against him like a wave. I felt the influence of it in the eyes and voices of the other children, reluctant to include me in their sport unless I could prove I wasn't like him (which although I resented at the time, I understand in hindsight). My mother, however, was possibly the hardest hit victim of the three of us, and that I wasn't able to protect her from her fate was something I will never blame destiny for - I can only blame myself.

My mother was beautiful every day I knew her, from my first memory of this life until the day I went to the city and left her behind forever. Her face was a tragedy, the sort of face that broke hearts and warmed them all at once. Her kind eyes I inherited, although in my old, ashen face they look much less forgiving. The whole universe sat inside their brown depths, and anyone who was blessed enough to be looked at the way she looked at me or her husband, suddenly had this certainty that they knew everything there was to know about this beautiful, terrible world. When she smiled, her lips slightly parted in a contented sigh and her old teeth - the teeth of someone in poverty, just like mine or any of our dwellers' - showing through, her eyes shone with joyful tears. The further into my life I got, the more I saw those tears, but fewer and fewer times were they accompanied by that heartaching smile, until I realised the tears were no longer out of joy at all. Unlike my father, she almost never revealed an opinion, or the extent of her knowledge of politics or history or geography. I was a curious child, more inquisitive than I am now (for now I only seek the information that I know I need, and save the rest of my calculating mind for the steps that follow those initial pieces of learning), but most of the ideas I sought so thirstily came from the father who guided me, not the mother who nurtured me. Perhaps it was her passivity that made the conclusion of her part in my story ever more devastating. As I should have seen coming - I think of it bitterly now as one of my only regrets - it both began and ended with Marius Finn.

Out of all the suspicious persons that passed through or settled in our community, Marius Finn was the one who always made mine and my father's skins crawl. From the first time I acknowledged him, standing with his black feather in hand to propose his solution to the drought which had devastated the desert neighbourhoods, I was convinced he was either a sorcerer, or the Devil himself. When he looked at me, he seemed to look straight through me - and on the way it was like he saw every single fibre that made up my being. Whenever I get searched or interviewed now, in adulthood, it's the memory of his intrusively knowing stare that makes my skin crawl, and causes my reluctance to cooperate. In my moments of darkest fear or self-loathing, the curses I fire at myself are all in his reedy voice. Worst of all is that, when I look in a mirror, I can see elements of his face staring out at me. The first grey hairs blossoming in my beard or at my high hairline. The deep frown creases between my eyes, which on his face were the most menacing part of all. Marius Finn always seemed out to seek vengeance. It took me time to realise just how true that idea of vendetta was, but once I knew it was impossible not to see it. I never fully understood the reason why Marius hated my father so, whether it was envy, insult or simply just evil spite, and not understanding whether there was any reasonable motives behind his immaculately planned attacks, as I would usually try to do with any of my criminal targets, only helps to fuel the rage I feel constantly towards him.

The vendetta had three elements, each working in conjunction with each other like clockwork. First there was my father. Marius found every bramble and barb he could along my father's path to ambition, and pulled it up high to tangle and ensnare him. When my father raised his feather to give an opinion to the council, Marius immediately sought to undermine and interrupt his ideas. Marius belittled him as a coward for choosing the sweet life pampered by the City rather than the hard life of a rancher and a farmer that his family had lived before him. These stories in particular got the support of the wider community, and thus my father's authoritative hold began to slip like a glacier in summer. The second gear in Marius' machine was yours truly. I had, and still have, a problem with pride and honour, and Marius provoked me, knowing that if he could find something to offend me I would strike back. The last thing that my family needed, when already beginning to be cast out, was a rowdy son committing a murder and setting the angry mob on us. And yet, even knowing this, there were some things which I could not resist.

And so came part three, my poor innocent mother. Looking back, I know there was never a point where she stopped loving me or her husband, but at the time all I felt as a thirteen year-old was hatred at her for how she had betrayed our family. Marius must have bewitched her in some way to get her to go with him to his house that evening, while father was training in the City, and stay the night in his arms - that spell was likely in the form of a threat to our safety or reputation, for my mother's greatest strength was her willingness to sacrifice herself if it would help us, a gift which I will always be far too self-invested to acquire. I would have missed the scene entirely if Marius hadn't engineered it to be so tragically perfect. My head hung low between my hunched shoulders, a posture which has caused me pain and prominent archedness with age, and I wouldn't have spotted my mother, hair ruffled, scratch marks and lover's sores on her neck and shoulder where her dress strap had fallen, behind the doorway to Marius' house if he hadn't hailed me on my way and caused me to turn towards him. When I saw her, there was no sympathy - not even any sorrow for our collective situation - only ugly, flaming rage. She was a traitor, she had broken my trust and I was furious. I must have approached him in blind anger as he hoped I would, fist raised to land the first blow against him even before I was within reach of his body.

If I could relive that evening again today, I would have noticed several things which would have stopped me reacting so rashly. First, there was the way he awaited my blows with arms open, showing to anyone who happened to see that he was surrendering, and was unarmed. That fact alone would be enough to stop me now. I have become extremely sharp at spotting traps set for me. The second thing I was a fool, a true, damn fool, not to notice was the bell by which his right hand hovered just behind the doorway. (Yes - seeing round corners is a skill I've picked up now, too). I managed to land four punches - the weak hooks of a teenager with very little to no fighting experience to his name - before the shrill ring of that bell, a sure shout of danger! attack! to all the houses within a significant radius, filled my guilty ears. The last thing I remember seeing before panic made me blind was my mother's face, shining from cheeks to chin with tears, urgently begging me to run, Gilead, run away.

And so I ran.

My father was the only person who came looking for me, as was to be expected - I had been all but outlawed by the town for my apparently unsolicited attack on an unarmed man (only my father's last threads of persuasion had stopped that being an official sentence) and my friends had long stopped caring about my wellbeing if it didn't affect their own. I had found a way-station some distance between our town and the city, and made a camp for myself there for the fortnight before I was found. My father marvelled at how far my legs had managed to carry me and how I had managed to survive by myself at such a young age, and that experience was one of the first times I really proved to myself how strong I could be when I needed, and how powerful having a passionate feeling burning in my stomach could make me. I was amazed at how I could still be so outraged and fuming but my father could be so calm at the same time. Sitting there at the station, waiting for a train which had stopped running decades ago, eating from a can of beans I had opened that morning, my father looked at me with his large, sad, blue eyes, so unlike mine and mother's smaller piggier ones, and confessed to me: "I've known for months."

I understood then that the last few years had been harder for my father than I would ever be able to fully comprehend. He had put on himself all the guilt for everything that had happened to our family - after all, it was because of his differentness, his unique choices, that there had been any hostility at all. Finally, after month-long chunks he spent between town and city, trying to find a better life for us while also making sure the life we had didn't become unliveable, my father was finally crumbling under the pressure. He couldn't go back to the town anymore, he said, and neither could I, for my own safety. I felt a tug of longing for a mother who I had finally started forgiving, now I had a second viewpoint from my father to help balance her case, but on the whole I understood that he was right. My home was not a home anymore. I would be safest becoming someone else in the city. However, the fear of the total unknown is not something I have ever been able to get over, and so I made my father swear he wouldn't leave me when we arrived there. Loading ourselves with cans of food and canteens of water, we continued the journey to the city on the backs of the horses he had brought when he came on his rescue mission. I was fourteen by the time we reached the humming outer wall of that ominous alien place, and not another year passed before I began my training to be a Peacekeeper, just like my father.

The Capitol was brighter, louder and more repulsive than I ever imagined. I had expected it to be some sort of Utopia, a place where my father and I finally fit in for our unique code of living, where we could freely be who we wanted without ever fearing for our lives again. I suppose to the people who have never known anything except its oppressive embrace, it is a Utopia - it provides them with everything their limited imaginations can thing of and they never have to struggle with difficulties like surviving, or working, or thinking for themselves. However, when we arrived, we simply went from being Too Different to Too Normal. Our dust-faded clothes were Too Plain. Our sense of justice was Too Boring. Training became the most interesting part of my life, even in the years before I turned eighteen and Marshall Stone became my personal instructor, changing my view of the world forever. I breathed the information I learnt in theory classes like it was keeping me alive, and the physical drills made my heart race more with eager anticipation than with physical strain. I developed muscle, and I grew smarter than I had been before, too. Even now I love learning new things - whatever people can teach me, I bask in, and I've never been so stubborn or stupid to think that my age means there's nothing more in this world for me to learn.

In the four years before I met Peacekeeper Marshall Stone, I became proficient in hand-to-hand combat, endurance and speed trials, mathematics, Panem history, use of technology and muttation zoology. I also grew to a height of five foot eight, where I would remain for the rest of my life, and filled out at the shoulders and in my legs and arms. I kept my hair longer than many of the other boys (some shaved it off completely), and still prefer to wear it long enough to tuck behind my ears. It keeps my eyes in shadow - an advantage if you want to remain undetected or unrecognisable for longer. However, by the end of that time, I still wanted something more. I had made friends - a gang of us who always stuck together and stood up against the most brutal of our instructors - but I still sometimes felt like I didn't belong. Just like my father, I wanted more. It was Marshall who finally gave that to me. When he first chose me for his elite combat programme, it wasn't because I was particularly outstanding or extraordinary. Indeed there were boys who were, those who could decapitate a dummy in a single blow, or who could recite every muscle in the body in under a minute - the ones who perhaps stayed awake at night wishing they were District-born, and could become tributes and victors instead of Peacekeepers. It was, I believe, because he could see what I knew about myself, that I was unsatisfied with just the prescribed training scheme. He wanted to give me something more.

What made Marshall extraordinary was more than his eccentric vocabulary, his embellished suit of armour or the way he always ate with one hand, the other never leaving the butt of his gun, it was the way he taught us as if every piece of information was something we already knew. "Of course"; "Naturally"; "Without doubt" he would begin sentences which contained vital pieces of strategic theory, never patronising us or assuming we didn't understand. It was as if he was drawing the future Peacekeepers from within us, like a wood carver finding the shape of a sculpture within the tree he intends to work on, rather than settling it on top of us. We forgot everything we thought we knew, that we had spent four hard yeas learning. "You're in my educational territory now, men, and you learn my way."

Marshall's way, it turned out, was to combine the physical drills with the mental ones rather than separating them. We fought sometimes with wooden staffs and sometimes with fencing foils, and as we lunged at each other we had to accompany the blow with a historical quote or line of poetry. If we failed to make a clean hit with both our weapon and our tongue, Marshall would smack his cane into our thighs and collapse us like cheap furniture. "Your brain and your tongue are muscles too, men, don't separate them from the rest." Of course, all of these drills and the more ridiculous ones - learning to walk a tightrope, use a potter's wheel blindfolded, and memorise an excessive amount of riddles (the latter a lesson I particularly enjoyed) - were periphery to the true aim of our training. Every Peacekeeper has to settle into a particular division, and although Marshall Stone was turning us into impressively well-rounded individuals, his work did have a direction. As our graduating day drew closer, he emphasised more and more that he was training us to be Gunslingers.

"Gunslinger" is, perhaps, an outdated word, but the trimmings of the job were everything one might see in an old movie they used to call "Westerns". (Western just means District Six now, which isn't really the same). Guslinging was more than just learning how to draw a revolver to fast to be tracked by the human eye. As a nineteen year-old, I learnt how to tie a gunbelt properly across my hips. At twenty, I had mastered riding a horse, and did it as naturally as I walked. By twenty-one, I could disassemble, oil, polish and reassemble a gun in a number of minutes. None of these things seemed particularly impressive to me as I was doing them, but I understand now that the people around me, including Marshall, my old friends and my father, found the speed at which I picked up the skills extraordinary. I avoided hubris - I have always found the condition to be a sign of weakness - and instead continued to focus on making the figures in my life proud of me. One of the skills I am most grateful for learning is the individual history of each District, for now when I pass through them as part of my assignments I am respected as an equal, not resented as an authoritative figure.

And graduating from Marshall's class was nothing normal either.  After five more years of intense practice and training, learning skills I hadn't even dreamed of beforehand, and having all but forgotten the boy I was before Marshall made me a man worth being, we had to prove ourselves one final time. We could choose to take the test at any  point - but we only got one chance, and if we failed we would be, in Marshall's words, "Sent West" - exiled back to the homes we had came from in shame. I could think of nothing worse. However, when I decided my time had come, I wasn't entirely confident like some of the trainees were waiting to be. I was impatient, sure, but also felt the same blazing determination that I had felt as a boy, itching to strike Marius in his doorway, and how I feel sometimes now when I know I'm closing in on a target. I had to act.

The day I stood opposite my master - soon to be my equal - the sun was like a white plughole, high in the intense blue basin that spread out above us. All of my fear and doubt drained out of me, straight through that hole, out of sight and reach, and I was left with a certainty and stability that now is so familiar to me. I don't let myself get afraid anymore. Marshall's face was as solid as his name suggested - I tried to mimic him, but was sure the sweat running down my large, flat forehead and shallow cheekbones stopped me looking so cold. All the other trainees, the number of us that were still around and hadn't been Sent West or quit of our own accord, stood at the edge of the long square that made our arena, looking on in stunned silence and hope - perhaps for a victory, or perhaps to see another one fall. The Games surely proved that Capitolites will do almost anything to see blood and suffering. It disgusts me, those innocent children - children, for fuck's sake - slaughtered to teach people a lesson; but I myself do know the thrill that comes with blood sport.

Our hands hovered over the butts of the revolvers we wore at our right hips, even before our umpire had begun to count our five ritual steps away from each other. I could feel my long fingers trembling, and it felt as if I was trying to swallow around a fist. Although the task was to get a clean shot in the other's shoulder, there was an unavoidable and solemn risk with Marshall's trial: if anything could prove the man truly was insane, it was the fact that his method of testing us could end up with us, or him, dead. As the wind blew dust in ribbons around our leather-booted ankles (Marshall's uniform was leather boots and denim jeans, an apparel I still stick to today to avoid indecision about petty things) we nodded at each other shortly. I think Marshall Stone quite liked me, and I trusted that, if he were to beat me, his shot would be true. It's important to trust people who are worth it - harbouring suspicion for everyone is a sure way to end up alone, and in danger. Together, my master and I recited the motto of his class, and I knew that if I failed it would be the last thing I was ever allowed to say to him. "I do not aim with my hand. I aim with my eye. I do not shoot with my hand. I shoot with my mind. I do not kill with my gun. I kill with my heart." And then the numbers started reeling off. One. As I took my first step, back turned to Marshall, I thought of my father. He had been stationed in another District for several years of my training, but wrote me letters in a secret code we had devised when I was a young child to let me know he was safe and ask me how I was. I always concluded my letters by telling him that I couldn't wait for his return, and what adventures we would have when I saw him again. Even though I was a man already grown, the childish adoration I felt for my father was undying, and in my letters I could express that. Two. I wondered if I would ever fall in love. I appreciated beauty, in people's minds more than their faces, and did hope that one day I would find someone who I could spend my life with and never grow restless. However, I was afraid of having someone else to put in danger - I still am afraid of that - and that fear for others outweighs my desire to not be alone. Three. What would happen if I failed? I couldn't go home, but I couldn't stay in the Capitol. Where was safe for me, anymore? Four. David. I named the gun David in that moment after a story Marshall had told us one evening. David, through sheer courage, felled a beast everyone thought was unfellable. Like David, I knew I was about to do something impossible, too - I knew it. 

Five.

It wasn't the first time I had fired my gun off, but in my memory it was certainly the loudest. The heat from the hammer reached my face in a gunpowder-scented lick, and I struggled desperately to keep my hand firm under the force of the recoil. My eyes were scrunched shut, my patchy eyebrows drawn close together instinctively, my dirty teeth gritted. However, I was quickly aware that apart from the tonal ringing in my ears, and the throbbing in the ball of my right hand, I felt no other pain. Tentatively, I glanced down at my own body, and was amazed to see that there was no sign of any blood blossoming from any shock-numbed wound. The ringing subsided and was replaced with the slightly bang-muffled whoops of my companions from the side of the square. My eyes slowly raised to where Marshall was standing before the call to fire - and found him lying, still and flat, on the dust. Like a man in a deep sleep, I dragged my feet over to him and gazed down at him. His eyes were closed blissfully, no sign that the pain from the wound that was bleeding relentlessly from his right shoulder was affecting him in any way. His voice came out weakly, but I could hear the pride in it and it made me swell with joy. "You shot with your heart, Gunslinger. Just like I knew you would." And just like that, Gilead the boy, Gilead the outcast, ceased to exist. I was Gilead the man, now - a weapon on his hip and victory on his shoulders. And I knew I was more thank that, too. I was Gilead the Justiceman, and Gilead the Gunslinger.

It was exactly nineteen weeks after I sent the good news to my father that I knew he was dead. I am certain because it was also exactly the same amount of time that it took the wound on Marshall's shoulder to first become a Problem, then a Serious Problem, and then a Lethal Problem. The number nineteen has since been intensely eventful for me, but to prevent it from bringing misfortune like it did that day I avoid it at all costs. However, it is also that number that taught me that coincidences don't exist, only fate, for it certainly was fate that I lost both of the fathers in my life exactly nineteen weeks after I made them both proudest. Nineteen was also Hazel Dalgaard's age the first time I encountered her, as a point to note, and that was a sigificant meeting (which will be explained later in the course of my account) if ever there was one. Knowing that Marshall was in danger was easier than knowing about a man I hadn't really seen for years. My graduating ceremony was around a fortnight after I beat him in our duel, and the taped-up wound on his shoulder was stinking and seeping even then. Nevertheless, Marshall was as hasty to deny weakness as I always have been, and gave me a dark look when I asked a second time out of concern. My first few weeks as a fully-fledged Peacekeeper were spent mostly on night patrols, and so I only heard how sick Marshall had become by word of mouth. They were saying that some serious parasite had found its way inside the hole in his chest, and was relentlessly making its way around his body, destroying everything in its path. "It's in his blood. It's in his blood and there's nothing they can do about it." The next time I saw him it was only in passing, but even that was enough to tell me Marshall was on his way to becoming nothing more than a corpse with a beating heart - and soon after a corpse without one. The man's skin was grey and dry, his bloodshot eyes staring out of his face like rubies in a pile of ash. His stench was undeniable, the smell of death hung on him like a cape. He could barely speak, or move his hand to greet me, and it must have taken all his strength for him to raise a hand to me in acknowledgement. I stopped, stared at him, and raised my own back. Sickness does not disgust me but it never fails to break my heart. I didn't feel guilty that it was my gunwound that had sealed his sentence, for I didn't do it intentionally, and I understood that this was his destiny. She can be cruel at times, but all things must always bow to serve her - and I have my fair share of things to resent destiny for too.

On the other hand, I have never been able to accept that my father was a victim of Destiny, too. The exact circumstances of his death have never been certain to me, but I have had enough time to make a picture of what happened, and thus give me a desire for revenge. I had awaited his response to my letter for what felt like years. Usually he responded in a number of weeks, and yet here I was waiting months, after the biggest piece of news I'd ever sent him, and still with nothing back. I didn't dare send another letter in case the first had been intercepted, for I was cautious not to put the rest of my operating unit in danger by revealing more information about my training in a second note. All I could do was wait, and plan the ways I was eventually going to get reassigned so I could go and find him myself. Nineteen weeks was the time it took to realise this could never happen. My heart flipped in my chest when I heard I had received mail, and I left my post immediately, to the chagrin of my co-guard. Impatience had finally got the better of me, something I'm usually very good at controlling now. My job involves a lot of waiting quietly, after all. When I reached the mail office and grabbed the envelope from the clerk's outstretched hand, I remarked that it felt different from usual. I can't say I was quite sure what it was - the weight, the texture, the shape perhaps - but immediately I had a dark feeling that something was very wrong. Right there, in front of the clerk, I tore the letter open, but where a piece of paper covered in my father's scrawling code should have been, there was something very different indeed. A single, black crow's feather. Bad news.

In my head, the series of events that rolled together to create that landslide of a moment went like this. What started as only dark looks aimed in the direction of my father - with his independent lifestyle, his assumption of authority, and his irritating way of always being right - soon evolved into dark thoughts. I had seen the beginning of those same dark thoughts becoming dark actions with the attack on my defenceless mother, but I'm sure after we left it continued to brew, like a storm at sea that slowly approaches the land where it can cause most devastation. It feels me with sick pain to think that after my father and I left, my mother had exhausted her usefulness to Marius, and he killed her to make his work easier, but I know that that is a very likely idea. Undoubtably, Finn took my father's position of power for himself, a king rat overseeing a litter, and used his new leverage to fuel the anger against us a little more. In some ways, I can't blame them for accepting his reign. Many people I meet actively seek someone to command them - I myself try to find guidance and wisdom wherever I can. And, besides, he had promised them blood, and I know even I can't resist a fight and a kill when one is offered to me. So I suspect that is when the manhunt began - all pitchforks and curses like you read about them having in the Old World. Bitterly, I wonder if I should be thankful he even lasted as long as he did. More than that, I am amazed he never told me he was afraid, although he must have known that his time was almost up. I spurn myself for not seeing all those steps ahead, and being oblivious to the inevitable fate of the man.

Neither my father nor my teacher would have been proud of me for seeking revenge on Marius and his cronies a second time, and forcing myself into an even further exile than I had before. I had a rank to uphold then, too, and my honour and my commitment to justice stopped me from behaving rashly. Instead, I spent months developing the ideal way to remove not only the villains of my town, but all of Panem's public enemies from the world they had so terrorised. The answer came to me easier than I thought it would: simply turn my urge for revenge into a duty. I have never shied away from the term "Bounty Hunter", although it makes me seem like I track down these Public Enemies for the reward more than the justice (though the coinage is a pleasant bonus I wouldn't turn away out of prudence). My targets are sent to me directly from the centre of the Captiol, the belly of the beast - a name, a face, some brief lines of information and a Dead or Alive reward figure. I adore the ambiguity of first tracking my targets down, then devising an attack strategy and then finally, painstakingly patiently, going in for the kill. I have no proud desire to give the Capitol executioners a job to do - only a foolish man would keep a criminal alive longer than they needed to. Luckily, there are no foolish men in this line of work. I have handpicked myself a posse of Hunters, training them in arts and histories as well as gunslinging, just the way Marshall trained me, and we ride as a pack, a single mind and a single destiny, together. I firmly believe in that last fact, that we truly exist as one, the way one's gun is simply an extension of one's heart and mind - which is what made me so certain, when I met her for the first time ten years ago, that Hazel Dalgaard was written to play a key role in my life. I was intensely pleased when she proved me right, nine years later.

I was rolling a cigarette outside the Academy School, notable for its vast number of notorious Gamemakers, and she emerged from within, which to me was one of many signs that she was one of the brightest people I would ever meet. I admire Gamemakers not as killers (there is no neatness in sitting at a desk, lighting forest fires or triggering earthquakes) but as artists, world-creators, and everything about the way she held herself and her books told me that one day she would make a truly extraordinary orchestrator too, an instrument of immaculately organised chaos. Knowing that my white armour and my dark eyes made me invisible to almost everyone around me, I was able to judge the teenagers bursting from the doors carefully. None seemed quite as solitary or as pondering as that first light-haired, bright-eyed girl, and recognising my own loneliness in her, I felt an instant need to keep her safe. It didn't take long for me to understand that desire would have to manifest itself, unless I wanted to see her broken mentally or physically soon in the future.

The first book left her grip with a thwack as a bigger, dumber girl knocked it to the ground with her heavy hand. To me, it was like reliving a dream, a serious déjà vu overcoming me like a fog. The tall girl suddenly had the face and voice of the largest rancher of our community, knocking the feather from the grip of my father to stop him from speaking, from healing the community that had turned to him for guidance. Hazel didn't look scared, I admired that about her instantly, only surprised and a little nervous. The oppressor began to belch out the insults I have heard a hundred times since, urging her oppressed to give up, telling her she would never fit in, that she'd be better off far away - all the same things said by every secretly repressed victim with a limited imagination as they try to hide how threatened they feel by those around them. If I had been Hazel's friend at the time (as I sometimes dare to consider myself now) I would have begged her to speak back, to say anything at all, but of course I was still just a stranger, listening in, ready to fight her corner if this bully's taunts ventured outside the lines of the Law. As it was, Hazel stayed silent and unreactive. That was when the girl punched her in the stomach. I myself winced slightly and drew my hand to my slim waist, barely able to watch as the rest of Hazel's work went tumbling to the floor like a flurry of sycamore seeds, and she doubled over to the great delight of the culprit. As Hazel continued to wheeze, and the other children scattered from the scene with no offer of help, I shook off the psychological pain and stepped forward to act. My voice was as cold as my sharp face as I uttered my warning to the girl, one hand on her shoulder and the other on the gun at my hip, the very same David, willing to fight off another giant if he had to. "You better watch how you act, friend," I let my natural drawl, so non-Capitol, elongate the words almost past sobriety, "whether you end up in jail or not, someday this one is gonna be your boss." As I walked away, leaving the girl, who probably had never interacted with a Peacekeeper her entire life but had definitely built up a fearful image of them, I found my heart beating strong and proud as I recalled the grin I had seen on Hazel's face, and the sparkling joy in her eyes.

It was years until I heard from Hazel Dalgaard again - close to a decade in which I can only assume she was becoming the brightest and most talented young Gamemaker of her class - but I never forgot her. I knew I was growing old, I could see my thin ankles starting to swell with arthritis, and my once muscular torso, though still strong and healthy, was beginning to turn soft, and I had already turned fifty (though I never celebrate a birthday) before I received a message from Headquarters where a Bounty poster should have been. My last kill, who I had just handed over to the undertakers to deal with, was a notorious arsonist in District Five, responsible for a number of house and school fires, and suspected for starting several more in hospitals and orphan community homes. Sick bastard. The letter arrived with courier, where usually I would go and collect one myself from the Main Building, and distribute copies to my posse. RETURN TO INSTITUTE IMMEDIATELY. it read, PERSONAL REQUEST FROM VIP. Needless to say I was intrigued; as a Hunter, I have become the target of several planned attacks, and so try to keep my location and identity as secret as I can. Furthermore, I cared little for so-called "VIP"s, which tended to mean Capitol celebrity sweethearts with nothing interesting at all to say. However, when Hazel herself greeted me when I arrived at the Gamemaker Insitute, looking ten years older and ten thousand times more beautiful and sophisticated, my surprise and distaste was quickly replaced with delight.

She kept herself admirably professional during the meeting that would become the first of many, explaining to me that she had personally selected me as her Bodyguard, if I chose to accept. All I could think was how proud I was that her destiny had been realised, that she was getting her moment in the sun - but I too played the solemn and formal gentleman, saying it would be an honour, rather than a pleasure, to keep her safe. We agreed I could still fulfill my original post as a Hunter, though my posse continue without me, as I think without me even telling her she understood that there was still one Public Enemy I was desperate to track down. I am also thrilled to know that I have earned her trust, something that seems to be a rare commodity, and that with the wisdom of my years I have been able to act as a counsellor for her the same way I am for my band of Hunters.

However, I know that good things seldom last forever. My spine, once straight, now hooks painfully, and the lines on my face are becoming deep-cut and dark. I find myself coughing unexpectedly, and although my senses are still sharp, they are indeed sharp enough for me to know they used to be stronger. I am embarrassed at my own old-age, and how it's come for me when some may still consider me young. But I know that fate isn't done with me yet. Until the day I kill the men who destroyed my life and my loved ones, and as long as I am still able to protect my champion of a friend and companion, I will continue to hunt, continue to learn, continue to seek out more for myself and the people around me. Although the world is starting to become the taste of old, stale breath, and the sound of my own gentle wheezing breaths, and the sometimes blinding pain of putting too much weight on my old bones, it hasn't ended me yet.