Ochbayar Elbegiin [District Thirteen]

The weight of leaving hits you three days after the fact, when aimlessly strumming the opening bars of a tune that refuses to finish writing itself fails to fill the quiet. This week has been the first time in your life that you've had to earn your right to wherever you lay your head down; you don't know how to live hand to mouth, you don't know what you'll fall back on if music doesn't keep you afloat, and you don't fully know where you intend to go from here even if it does. Here—a room above the first restaurant whose owner you could talk into trading one in return for playing in their courtyard—is itself little more than what happened to lay in the direction you started walking the day your conscience hit its breaking point.

But you can't go back, can't live the life your parents tried to raise you in. Not for so empty a cause as profit. And maybe music can't unravel what you left behind, but tonight was good—coaxing smiles out of strangers alongside tips, seeing the mood of a room sway subtly in time with your playing. At least you can bring a little joy to one corner of your world at a time.

At least you can live whatever life you build without destroying anyone else's.

---

Attached to a wealthy enough family to be seen at this wedding but too young for any of the adults to care that you're a person, you perch reluctantly on the edge of your chair until the waiters clear the final course and your parents finally, finally give you leave to escape. Stay in sight, they tell you as the energy thrumming under your skin finally uncoils, but you know they trust you enough not to follow when you vanish into the dance floor, and for the first time all night you breathe easily—whirling between adults who smile in that irksome indulgent way but ask you no infuriatingly boring questions, jumping formlessly to the beat with younger children until their families call them away, spinning alone with your hair swirling around you and your feet moving of their own accord until you feel like you're holding yourself up on the music itself. You don't stop until the band shifts into the first slow dance since you touched the floor; it breaks your rhythm and you stumble out of the crowd to half-collapse against the wall by the side of the stage, gasping for breath but glowing, too, from somewhere deep in your heaving lungs.

The bassist, free for this waltz, sits by the edge of the stage to down some water. You don't think she's even noticed you until she says, voice pitched under the music, "You've got rhythm, kid. You a musician?"

Startled, you look up at her properly, and find you can't even protest the kid; she looks young, her face soft and haloed by tight curls, but there are crinkles at the corners of her eyes so warm that you can't help but smile back. "Yeah," you say, reveling in the knowledge that she wouldn't have asked if she wouldn't believe that answer. "My dad is teaching me piano." It's dignified, he says; personally, even though you look forward to the lessons, you always feel a little silly glued to the keys of an instrument so much bigger than you are. "But I like guitar better."

"Hey, good choices." She'll tell you, in time, why she settled on bass as her ensemble instrument—how much she especially loves singing and playing at once, holding the energy of a song together in the most and least obvious of ways. But you wouldn't care if she explained that now, and you certainly don't think to ask; all you care about is the tacit approval you hear in, "I started on guitar."

You fold your elbows around and do your best to look as nonchalant as she does. She doesn't seem to notice that you're trying to share a little camaraderie; when she finishes drinking she caps the water bottle and makes to stand, even though the song her bandmates are playing doesn't sound over yet. Not really thinking about it, just trying to hold onto the evaporating moment, you blurt, "I'm good at it!"

"That right?" the bassist asks—seriously, not indulgently, with a thoughtful tinge to that warm smile. She still stands, but she fishes a card from a pocket first; Carolina Picturesque, you read when she hands it to you, and you flip it curiously to find an abbreviated list of rates for gigs and—

"Lessons?"

"I've got openings, if you're interested," she says as she straps her instrument back over her shoulder. "No pressure."

"I'm Ochbayar," you say, with a smile so wide it almost hurts and the breezy confidence of a child whose parents have always been able to afford to deny them nothing. "See you soon."

---

Performance requires perception—making yourself part of the energy of a room, watching your audience's cues even when you look busy, judging before you try one how a dance or a ballad will land. It's easier in front of a crowd, when you can tailor reactions to one person after another without giving anyone time to dig too deep, but conversation is performance too, in its way, and you're still enough in your element to recognize someone putting on a show. "What are you really asking for?"

Armel hesitates just enough to tell you that you weren't supposed to ask questions back. "I don't understand what you're asking, Mx. Elbegiin."

You cross your arms and sit back, too nonplussed to pretend otherwise. You've never bothered to officially bury your identity, but it's been years since you introduced yourself with your family name, and longer since you learned to steer conversations away from your upbringing; on the rare occasions anyone asks, it's usually more because they think asking seems polite than because they care, and it's easy enough to give them something more interesting to ask about. The city, your songs, the road, the news. Ideally, in this case, the gig you thought you were walking into this room to negotiate for.

Armel's tone isn't interest or civility, though. And he's not distracted, the way you thought when he first asked about talk out at the tungsten mine. He's making a point.

You just wish you felt more sure about what that point was.

"If you're expecting me to put you in touch," you say, forcing lightness through your rolling discomfort, "you're out of luck. I'm a bit of a prodigal heir."

"That does imply you plan to return home for forgiveness." You stand abruptly. He lifts a hand without exactly reaching toward you, palm out, and says, "Wait. I'm sorry, Mx. Ochbayar. That was uncalled for."

The apology keeps you from turning on your heel, but you don't sit back down, either. "My music is for sale, not my integrity. I don't gossip for people who won't tell me their business and are far too interested in mine."

"That's good to hear." He straightens his back with the focus of someone who's made a decision. "Jacquelyn Goodwin referred you to me—"

"You could have started there."

"Would you have trusted my intentions?"

"Intentions?" you ask with all the cluelessness you can project, lowering yourself back into your chair. It would be a stretch to say you carry messages for Jacquelyn often, but you help where you can; it's easy for you to go just about anywhere you like in Two without it looking suspicious, and the more contacts she can establish, the better chance the strike she's organizing might do more than get her killed. A mine executive taking an interest in her is either very good news or very bad news, and you have no interest in telling him anything concrete until you're certain which it is. "All you've told me is that I should thank a friend for free advertising."

Armel regards you steadily. "I am sorry for prying. I understand Ms. Goodwin has placed no small amount of trust in you, but I needed to hear for myself where you stand. Your parents' work makes life... difficult, for a significant number of people."

For a fragment of a breath, you remember how slowly and carefully Carolina broke out her favorite songs, all those years ago—how little she trusted you even though she liked you, even though you were a child not yet complicit in your parents' work, even as you stewed over lyrics older than Panem and started to do exactly what she hoped you would: ask questions. Your time with her shaped you as surely as the parts of home you miss—your father telling you his grandparents' folktales about a sky full of suns or Suho and his horse, the patience your stern mother always found for teaching you a new skill.

More, you suppose, because her lessons were the ones you chose.

"Are you trying to gently break the news to me that my parents are bad people?" One of you is going to have to come out and say it, and you're pretty sure that if this was a Peacekeeper, you'd already be in chains. "They're ammunitions manufacturers. They don't care who the machine they're greasing grinds up, as long as it keeps them rich." You spread your hands, a deliberate and dry mockery of nonchalance. "Tell me something I don't know."

Armel's real smile is at once gentler and more purposeful than the one he gave you when you shook hands, when he was an executive hiring a performer for his daughter's graduation party. It might be the first real expression he's shown you since you walked in; you spare a thought to wonder, uneasily and reluctantly impressed, whether you've actually had any say in the direction of this conversation at all. "Alright," he says, and he begins to tell you about District Thirteen.

---

The weight of leaving hits you three weeks after the fact, when someone reassigns a slot in your schedule and you find yourself in a therapist's office struggling to fit every vital and pointless worry in your head into coherent words. How you know you're good at what you do, but being good doesn't seem to matter, because Armel had been doing just fine for a lot longer than you when he got himself killed. How you need music right now, but the song you're working on feels stuck somewhere in the back of your throat and you can't scrape yourself raw enough to get it out. How you've already been advised to handle feeling out of place by making your room your own, but that doesn't make any fucking sense because your idea of home—of safety—was a road long before your work for Thirteen made staying in motion an actual matter of life or death. How you miss almost no one in particular, but you miss everyone in general—the network of people whose lives you danced along the fringes of, the bartering for payment in cash and in kind, the knowledge that almost anywhere in Two you could find someone who would welcome you to stay and let go without protest when you left. How you feel guilty, despite everything, for wishing you'd had a chance to say goodbye to your mentor but not to your parents. How you can't stop wondering whether you'd have had that chance—whether, maybe, you would still be in Two—if you had followed protocol and waited for instructions instead of panicking and crashing a rendezvous over one empty dead drop.

For some reason, the therapist seems to think it's a productive first meeting. You go back to your weird, permanent room feeling even worse, fling yourself on the bed, and do the musical equivalent of trying to break down a wall with your head.

Most days, you remind yourself when you've calmed down a little, aren't this bad. You are good at what you do—spying isn't so different from any other performance; it's all about listening to what people mean behind what they say, and responding in kind. Thirteen even wants you to keep doing it. They're giving you proper training this time around, and you aren't sure how you feel about being part of a team, but you're perfectly familiar with the hopeful flutter in your stomach at the thought that they might send you out in the world again.

Music will always be first and favorite in your heart, the thing you turn to when you need to feel soothed or buoyed or connected. Even here, in the grey underground, you find ways to make it part of your life; you trade compositions for favors and sign up to play at evening meals not for money but for the joy of it. But it can't be your life's centerpiece anymore, and you're having an easier time than you expected coming to terms with that part. Whatever else you feel anxious and wrong-footed about in Thirteen, you believe in this cause you've dedicated yourself to; if you had to upend your world a second time, at least you can do some good with the pieces you're gathering back up.

At least—if you stay good at what you do, and if the team works out as well as the people who put it together seem to expect, and if you're very lucky—you'll be taking down something that deserves to be destroyed.