push me out from the land | Omryn [moose] & Marcy

"Are you fucking kidding me."

Scattered conversations like this are cropping up around the zoo, even as the team of harried Games techs responsible for them peer around corners and duck down back hallways to escape attention. There are keepers fighting for their beloved charges, directors puzzling over logistics, zoo visitors baffled by the sudden kerfuffle, eager scientists thinking of the data, horrified staff thinking of the children. And then there's Marcy.

"Do you know how long it took to get the funding to transport him back?" she snaps at an event planner who tries very hard not to wince and only mostly succeeds. "Years. Years, management kept saying no, do you know how many weasels we could collect instead—"

Years ago, back in the Dark Days as supplies tightened and the zoo staff scrambled to ship animals away before they had to make the choices no one wanted to call culling, some of the keepers had one more option up their sleeve: driving their animals out into the wilds that the Capitol loved to tell Districters no longer existed, and letting them loose. With so many animals raised in captivity and rebels infiltrating those same wilds, it wasn't an ideal plan—but Panem's forests and deserts weren't targeted the way its capital city was, and whatever had been done to the landscape in the name of economic development, there would be food in the wilds long after blockades started strangling Panem. Some of the animals would die, but, proponents argued, the most fragile were also the most easily kept at the zoo—the salamanders and moles and fish—and of those they sent away, the survivors would be easy to chip with locators, track, and bring back home in six months.

Six months turned into a year, then two, then several, and by then the zoo had food again but also new priorities: a public relationship to rebuild, experiments dropped in their laps, half-starved animals to coax back to health. Some of the easier and closer Release, Recall animals were brought home—a pack of wolves, a handful of porcupines, whichever birds strayed closest to the Capitol on migration—but the megafauna in the north, however hard staff lobbied, stayed on the back burner. Until—

(Omryn hardly minded. Unsure how to forage, let alone deal with bears, he had enough close calls those first few months to long for his duller but safer home—but he learned in time to put on weight for the winter, and in his first wild spring he barely gave the humans he saw each day or the reliable feeder in his stall a second thought. He tumbled into a lake hole for his first accidental, exhilarating swim; he tasted fresh maple shoots; he roared a challenge and broke an overeager wolf's leg, and knew himself lord of wherever his feet called him to roam. Given the chance, he would have asked to stay there forever. He thought he would; if he had thought about it at all, he would have supposed the zoo had forgotten him, or perhaps left him out here on purpose. Until—)

—this week.

"I'm so sorry, ma'am," says the planner, who has now heard about this situation at length but clearly not taken enough of it to heart, as he keeps failing to concede to Marcy's arguments. "I'm sure they'll pay you for him, they just want, you know... the, the antlers and all—"

"That doesn't get my time back," Marcy snaps. "Get something else with pointy bits, we've been advertising the day he gets out of medical and you're not wasting my career over giving some snot-nosed kids something to stick their swords in."

Whatever their opposing opinions on his presence here, however disparate their motivation in wanting him not to go to the Arena, Omryn and Marcy have found unlikely unity in trumpeting at the team of handlers looping ropes around his antlers and a collar around his neck. But the planner, despite his fumbling, unprepared apologies and the way he's winced his way through this entire conversation, is the one with backup. In the end, Omryn and Marcy can do nothing but roar as he's loaded onto a new truck.