A Circus of Eagles [An HG Fanfic]

Neon

If you were to hover above the Capitol at night, you would see some incredible things.

You would see the way it forms a perfect circle, a circuit-board disk glittering with thin wired connections. You would see how, in the north, the lights grow sparse and distant; these are the mansions of the Ferrous sector. The very rich can afford to live out of the way, and in the Capitol, as they would say, aurum est potestas. Gold is power. Here the most influential families train their children to be politicians, advisors, people of intellect, shrewdness and note. An empty patch towards the border with the Steel sector gapes like a black hole. This is where the Gamemaker Academy used to be, before the rebels tore it to the ground.

You would see how the lights never go out over the Gold sector, nestled away to the south-west, where money never sleeps. Even now life in the Capitol is expensive. The banks and moneylenders here are open for business at all hours. You would see the occasional building site, especially out towards the south-east, where tiny ant-like figures take advantage of the relative stillness to go about re-constructing their way of life. Entire suburbs in Haematite were burned down entirely and are built up slower than elsewhere; their people are too busy serving others. It has been six months since the Treaty and yet the Capitol is still not back to normal. It will never be normal again. Always a rebuild, a construct, a weak copy, of its former self.

And you would see Neon.

Neon is impossible to miss. As the name suggests it stands out brightly among the orange-white lights of elsewhere. From above it forms a ring around the sector-less Capitol Center and its four high-market districts: Platinum, Silver, Amethyst and Garnet. A circle, glowing in every color of the rainbow as if designed specifically for the view from the sky. The center of the Capitol's party lifestyle, the home of all the fashionable clubs and bars, anywhere worth queuing for hours just to be seen doing so. If you listen closely you can pretend that you hear the music, an eclectic mix of everything that is popular now and which was popular just under a generation ago, as the retro trend goes. Heavy beats and shrill vocals, coupled with electro-snyth pulses and even the occasional slow, orchestral piec. Rumor has it that the people of Neon never sleep. Possibly this is because they can't.

Today, then, Neon rests.

For once, the Sector Center doesn't need cleaning up. Last night no B-list celebrities stumbled across the plaza and threw up next to the fountain. No groups of rebellious drunk teens from Copper lounged on the benches, pretending to be grown ups and therefore not obliged to put their trash in the cans. No discarded shoes lie along the mood-lighting tiles. The morning-shift Avoxes turn up, look around, shake their heads and go on to the next job.

By the afternoon, the stage is almost complete. It should be done by now but, like the people of Silver - which runs along a quarter of their central border - the people of Neon like things to be done right. Since the first temporary scaffolding went up the plaza has been occupied by a small number of event-planning agencies all looking to have their say. Some are even attempting to get advertising space - some things never change.

Across the rest of the sector the mood is sombre and trying hard to pretend it isn't. Teenagers are dressing in their brightest, boldest outfits as if this is just another party. The schools are closed. The grassy parks, pumped full of the sweet fragrence of flowers and grass that is as synthetic as the trees themselves, are empty. To cover the awful, fearful silence, most people have their holoscreens on. Though that is no better. The rebels - still 'the rebels' after six months of being in charge - have blocked all the channels except one: the reaping channel.

Right now it shows a sweeping view over a sector made of uniform white and grey buildings, shiny but understated. For the Capitol, at least. Scene established, the sector logo fades onto the screen; a knife and fork, crossed, over a wine glass, a syringe resting on top of them. For those out in the districts who aren't familiar with the sector symbols the word Quartz is added in a curly, looping font.