A Circus of Eagles [An HG Fanfic]

Avox - Milo

Milo

"That will do, Milo."

I step back instantly. Cornelius isn't a bad man but he can't stand more fussing than is necessary. If he says that's it, that means I stop straight away and don't even finish what I was doing, which was pinning his suit. He turns in the mirror, twisting so he can check how he looks from every angle.

"Good job. I look a decade thinner!"

He laughs and I bob my head obediently in a gesture of laughter. He isn't that old really, maybe in his forties or something, but it's not how old you are, it's how old you look. And he looks young. In the very prime of his youth, when he was my age, he must have been a handsome man. Now he is merely pleasant-looking. My Ma always told me you can trust the ones with kind eyes. That it doesn't matter where they're from or who they're with, someone with kind eyes is good right through to their very core and goodness like that is hard to beat down. Cornelius has kind eyes and sometimes he gives me presents. An old shirt. A vial of aftershave. A hairbrush. Things like that. Things that, if I were to wear them back home, would make some of the others rip them from me and scratch at my skin out of pure jealousy.

And when I say home I no longer mean the shabby little hut on the outskirts of Ten. I mean my crowded dorm-block in Haematite. The Silence Halls; that's what the others call it.

Cornelius surveys me in the mirror with those kind eyes and I snap to attention. Hands behind my back, eyes straight ahead. Pretending to be blind. People don't like having servants who might be watching them. We are supposed to be presentable at all times. No. That's not really true: we're supposed to be invisible at all times, but presentable too. Just in case anybody happens to pay attention to us. So my silver bodysuit is spotless and my hair combed right back from my face. Cornelius taps my chin to make me look at him.

"You're at the reaping later today, aren't you?"

I nod.

"Worried?"

Shake.

"Good man." He pats me on the shoulder awkwardly, an unexpected gesture that almost brings tears to my eyes, and bounds towards the door. "Hey, Falcon! Come and see what the boy did!"

Falcon saunters in, all slimline dark suits and hair gel and camphor. He always dabs a touch of it on his pillow before he goes to sleep and Cornelius complains like an old woman. Then they argue. Falcon says that if Cornelius doesn't like it he can go and find another bed to sleep in and Cornelius says that this was his bed to start with until Falcon hurled himself in it and Falcon replies that actually, he pays the bills so it doesn't matter whose bed it is and sometimes he adds to this a pinch or a kick and I see Cornelius' eyes go wide with hurt.

It's a good job that Avoxes can't talk. What we know could bring down Capitol society more than any treaty.

But today Falcon is in a good mood. He admires Cornelius and sends a nod in my direction. "You did well, boy," he says, and from him this is a compliment indeed so I bob my head and treat it as such.

They're going to the reaping. Anistar is too young for the bowl yet but everybody has to go. She isn't my charge - technically Cornelius is the only person I'm bound to, and I'm glad that if they ever bear to separate then I will go with him - but something in her reminds me of something I can't quite put my finger on. I think that perhaps I had a sister and maybe she was like Ani. But I can't tell. Towards the end, when they started to suspect rebellion, they started to hijack everybody they took as an Avox, just in case, with the end result for me that I'm never sure which of my memories are real and which aren't.

I go through to Ani's room, where she is laid back on her bed and staring at the ceiling. The star projections are on again and for a moment I stop and gawp in wonder too, because it's like they've cut straight through to the sky. Thousands of jewels glitter above Ani's head. I wish that I could tell her how they move as the night goes on, how sometimes stars will flash in little sparks and that if you see one you have to make a wish, how it feels to stand in the moonlight. But I can't. It might not even be true.