A Knife in the Dark | ✓

Four

Cato was better by Reaping Day, and he'd become a lot closer to me. He'd suddenly become more touchy, always keeping some form of physical contact with me. Laelia, who he'd have married if he didn't fall in love with someone else by the time she turned eighteen, didn't seem to care. She exactly didn't like me, but she didn't necessarily hate me. She only liked him for his looks and position in our society, anyway (or so I thought).

He wrapped his arms around my waist as we waited to check in for the Reaping. "How many times is your name in today?" He murmured, and his mouth was so close to my ear that I could feel his lips brushing against my skin when he talked.

"Twenty," I said. "You?"

"Forty-eight." He replied easily.

It was standard for a lot of the richer kids that train to take tesserae. It was a system a large group of us came up with a few years ago. Tesserae were basically an exchange--you could take one for every member of your family, yourself included. I could take four. It added however many entries to your original one for each year that you were entered in the Reaping. Like the number of slips with your name entered for the Reaping, they were cumulative, and so the number went up each year. What we did was we entered our names as many times as we could and we privileged kids kept a list of the number of families that year that needed grain and oil. We divided up the supplies by family and size of the family, and whatever the large group of us couldn't cover, we had some of the poorer kids take for tesserae. Usually we could cover everyone. That year, we had a surplus.

"Bell's worried you'll get Reaped." I told him. "Or that you'll volunteer."

"What did you tell her?"

"That it's your choice." I said. We inched forward. "I assured her that you won't volunteer unless you're absolutely positive it's what you want to do, and then you'll come back to us because you love her more than anything."

"What did she say to that?"

"That you love me more than you love her."

"Impossible," he snorted. "She's my baby sister."

I rested my hands on top of his, which rested over my stomach. "I know," I replied, "that's what I told her. I explained that you love us differently, but that doesn't mean that you love her any less or me any more."

"Thank you." He sighed, pressing a kiss to my cheek. He exhaled slowly and turned around. "Would you two stop making out already? We get it, you're finally dating."

I heard Clove giggling behind us. "Oh, come on, Cato. You can't lecture us about PDA when you and Atala are...well. Like that."

"They aren't noisily making out." Saylee turned and said from in front of me and Cato. "They also aren't about to--"

"Keep it moving." One of the Peacekeepers said to us, bored out of his mind. I recognized him as one of Cato's brother's friends. I thought he was friends with Lars, but I couldn't be sure.

Cato waved him off, confirming my train of thought. "We're going, Kaeso."

"Doesn't look like it, Cato." He said. He was grinning beneath his visor. "And if I catch you two in the Gardens later, I'm beating your ass."

"Shut up." Cato grumbled.

I checked in first, holding out my hand to let them prick my finger. I didn't flinch, even when the woman smacked my throbbing finger against the paper. I stuck my finger in my mouth as I walked away, trying to stop the bleeding.

"See you when we're done." Cato said. He and Jake hugged us three girls quickly before rushing over to their side of the fenced off area.

Saylee, Clove and I linked arms and started towards the girls side. We found our age group and stood in with them, pressed tightly together. Saylee had her fingers crossed. I grabbed one of her shaking hands, and Clove took the other. We three exchanged a nervous smile before turning to the stage.