Prologue
Life, for me, was unfair.
You wouldn't understand. They destroyed it all. Every single tiny bit of my life was taken from them – my mother, my sister, my father, and then finally, my name.
If you don't know who “they” are, then you have no hope.
Good luck.
Chapter 1
The day I was born, it rained.
In District Five, rain was unheard of. We lived in a constant desert, mainly because of the fact we were the backbone of the Capitol – we made anything to do with upgrading the body.
That's why we didn't need any land. We didn't need to be in one special place, because we were scientists.
My mother wasn't anything special, a scientist, like my father. She was quite happy with her job and didn't want to move up nor down, because she had no special wish for her life. Mother wanted to be born, live, then die.
According to my brother, it rained so hard that the grass was actually green for a few months afterwards. I mean, the grass, green?
But enough about the grass.
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As my life begins, I hadn't seen a lot of things, and the first thing I'd never seen is two people more in love than my parents. At least, that was before my brother.
My mother and father were total opposites – my mother was short, stocky, blonde haired and brown eyed whilst my father was tall, thin, with red hair and blue eyes. My brother and I were a mix of both, and I learned that the differences grew as we grew. My parents worked as “scientists” - mixing together DNA to be sent off to a secret lab that no-one had seen before. Some nights my father would come home happy; other nights, he would come home shouting and destroy the house.
I grew up in this world of experiments and shouting and screaming and love. It was chaotic, but me and my parents managed.
I think the best memory I had was the day my brother was born. My mother had been going out for hours at a time, leaving me locked in the house with the re-runs of the Hunger Games to occupy me. She would come back ruffled and messy and with a big grin on her face, probably because things had been harsh between my mother and my father. He was about to be promoted and so was spending as much time as possible at the laboratory, and I think my mother was getting stressed.
Nine months later, my little brother was born. He was my pure blood brother – it turned out I had been the spawn of a cheating relationship as well. My “father” was in fact not my father.
After the day my brother was born, we went to live with the man I was meant to call Daddy, but in fact I called him by his real name – Blue. In fact, I never really spoke to him at all unless I was needed.
My life after that was a monotone. Until the day of my first reaping.
