Kalyd Journeyman had not been built to sustain an audience's attention. Before his second Hunger Games had begun, and long before the revelry that proceeded these Hunger Games had ever started, Kalyd had understood this truth and embraced it warmly, because he hadn't particularly minded the way in which humanity had perceived him. He'd leaned against the bows of wooden fishing vessels and stared into magenta skylines, his eyes flitting from sinking suns to the face of his closest friend to the sea and the sky and the ocean spray, and he'd figured that two sorts of people existed on this earth, those who observed the world and those whom the world observed. His friend had fit neatly into the latter category, blind and beautiful as he'd been, but Kalyd himself had always been a spectator, simple to behold and simple to please. And had he remained in District Four for the entirety of his simple life, he would never have needed worry about the eyes of the nation—he'd have lingered happily in the crook of a rowboat for as long as he was able, drinking his fill of the natural world and encouraging other, likeminded spectators to do the same.
Yet he stood today on a wireframe stage miles from the shores of District Four, and he stared into the blackness of a washed-out Capitol plaza, and, under the invisible scrutiny of thousands of spectators, Kalyd acknowledged at last that his role had shifted. Though he had not been built to sustain an audience's attention, the Capitol had painted over his simple foundation with gold leaf and peacock-blue silk and every wonder that their manmade paradise could spare, and the world looked upon him now as a breathing work of art. He'd need to speak to them as a work of art would, with none of the simple mannerisms that would lose an audience's attention; he'd need to smile like the presidential portraits that lined the Capitol walls, wave like a trained performer, grasp the audience within his gloved hands just as the President held him within his own.
But Kalyd did not know how to captivate, and so he approached the podium and opened his mouth with the intention of doing the exact opposite.
"Good evening," he said, his electronically-augmented voice quieter in his own ears than it had ever been before, his heartbeat a whir in his throat. He paused to collect his thoughts, because those first two words had thrown the unwieldy weight of his actions onto his shoulders and because he could feel eyes behind him as well as before him; his escort had instructed him to speak of his personal journey, to honor the Capitol, to cement his own legacy alongside Panem's, and yet he'd found in the minutes before this victory speech that he could not speak a single word about himself. Even now, under the stares of a million citizens, that brilliant, intrinsic quality that he'd imagined that living artwork should possess had not illuminated him, and he did not think that he could pretend that it had.
So he spectated instead.
He'd always been particularly good at viewing things—remembering things, treasuring things, honoring things. And so, when Kalyd opened his mouth and addressed Panem for the first time, he hoped that the audience's stares cut through him like light through glass, that he, prism-like, directed their beams of attention toward the beautiful things on which he'd been fixated since he'd stepped from the cavernous arena.
"I'd like to talk about my fellow tributes," said Kalyd, and he bowed his head as he projected himself one last time from the confines of his own body. "I'd like you to remember them with me."
And for seven minutes, the nation did.
*
The house on the bluff had grown derelict through years of abandonment, its oaken boards rotted and warped and its glass panes caked in a shroud of dust. Kalyd had thought it dismal and depressing when he'd first spotted it, its angular exterior jutting from the cliffs like the skeleton of a long-dead beast, but a few morning walks along the bluff and a few ventures closer to the house's walls had birthed within it a strange, antiquated charm. It looked nothing like Kalyd's victor mansion, nor had it been built to resemble a Capitol home—the architecture was textbook District Four, a combination of pastel-painted surfaces and oversized bay windows and porticoes sprouting from all four sides, and its short-shrift extravagance reminded Kalyd of the merchant's sector that had once characterized his District Four. (They'd done away with the merchant's sector, of course, when the Capitol had standardized housing and built the supervised forum over Dilly's Fountain, but these features still loomed in Kalyd's mind as if they'd existed only two years before. Despite the inherent optimism he harbored, his transition to modern life had been painfully difficult.)
So Kalyd had contacted the Capitol, and he'd received his state-of-the-art tools by supersonic train, and he'd begun to hammer and sand and drill into the house that had fallen apart. In the weeks prior, his escort had been pressuring him to choose a "talent," as the Capitol liked to call the televised victor hobbies that consumed great swathes of official airtime, and Kalyd was fortunate that he hadn't rushed himself and chosen landscape painting, as he'd been so tempted to do at first. Staring at scenic vistas while desperately developing his fine motor skills might've passed the time adequately, but staring at scenic vistas while driving nails into fresh boards provided a strange kind of relief. He'd been angry for a long time, he realized as he worked his anger into the house's foundation. He'd been more optimistic than angry, and this was what had saved him in the end, but some of the man who'd beat against the walls of his regeneration room still huddled inside of his weary body, so angry at times that he could not feel anything at all. So he expelled that man as he drilled through old slabs of plywood, as he stared at the district that had transformed while he'd slept; it was only once he'd released the anger that he'd allow himself to swivel around, to finally look from the neighborhoods that had abandoned him to the seascape that never could. Once he'd finished all of the dismantling and rearranging, and once he'd torn his way through the larger, more dangerous tasks—this took about six long months, during which time half the district had begun to whisper eagerly about the house's future—Kalyd found that the fiercest pieces of his identity had dissolved with the workload, and he re-entered the district center that night with no trace of bitterness remaining, and he introduced himself to the people crowded in the government-supervised forum for the first time, and he was glad to meet them all.
The next six months took Kalyd by surprise, not because they were any easier to live than the first six months but because he received help in doing so. The adults he met were perfectly pleasant, of course—they'd appreciated his eulogy, they'd seen the way he treated American during the final battle and they'd thought of it warmly for months—but the children in particular took a liking to him, and they began to follow him wherever he went. He found that he could complete a good deal of work on the house while school remained in session, but when the afternoon bell rang and a stream of children coursed across the bluffs toward his half-completed house, he was forced to hide his tools in a shed he'd built beside the east wing and stand outside the front door, warning children away from the building. The problem was that they interpreted these warnings as invitations; they liked Kalyd, and they'd seen him on TV, and they'd learned that he did not yet view the world in the ways that an adult should, so they asked him about "Old District Four" and they scattered their muddy loafers across the unfinished floors and they made attempts at simple, stupid conversation. This was the kind of conversation that Kalyd liked best, so after a good three weeks of attempting to repel the children from his second home, he resigned himself to their presence. And after a good three weeks of them simply lingering around the house, he decided he might as well let them do something, and he pulled out the brushes and the paint cans and he let them paint over the old, garishly-pastel walls in brand-new garishly-pastel colors. (Some of them refused to work for free. Because of this, Kalyd ended up with about fourteen pre-teens on salary and a strict verbal agreement not to discuss child employment practices with the Peacemakers. By some strange miracle, their secret remained safe.)
The house grew into itself as Kalyd grew into the community, and, in both of these respects, Kalyd did not want his work to ever end. He added tasks that weren't strictly necessary to the completion of the job—he built a new wing on the east side of the house for social gatherings, he ate dinner with several employees' families—and at some point he realized that he'd stopped building and integrating simply for the sake of moving things forward. He'd entered "New District Four" with that explicit goal in mind, of course, because he'd wanted a future and he'd wanted to change, but building a life had seemed so much like labor at first that he'd been forced to treat it as such. But the nature of his daily life had changed, hadn't it?
He considered it one evening as he perched on the edge of the bluff, his legs dangling from the cliffside and a salt-laden breeze whistling through his hair. Behind him, he could sense the bulk of the house and all of its useless new additions looming over his comparatively-tiny body, and in front of him, he could hear the shrieks of gulls as they wheeled toward the distant horizon, their wings beating the air with familiar desperation. The future sat behind Kalyd, while the past sat ahead; yet he could easily turn and face the house again, and the orientation of these two entities would switch, and he'd be facing the future and ignoring the past, wouldn't he? But he could rotate in place as many times as he liked. For the rest of his natural life, he'd remain a devoted spectator—he'd gaze at the beautiful worlds he valued, and he'd hoard them in his mind like a child surrounded by beloved old things—but here, now, perched safely on the edge of a cliff, Kalyd understood that he could stare at whatever he wanted and remember whatever he liked, and the things behind him would still remain, waiting patiently for him to turn and look upon them and value them once more.
Kalyd had built his new life around hope. He'd planted it in the soft soil of his mind when the Games had seemed darkest, and he'd labored to preserve it as doubt and regret had battered at its roots; his desperation had transformed the task into a kind of work, and he'd imagined at moments that his life would remain that way forever, him striving in vain to turn his fragile hope into something greater than itself. But eventually the work had grown easier, and then it had ceased to be work at all, and he'd closed his eyes and he'd opened them again and there the hope was, blossoming, complete. Now it was happiness. Now it was his.
Circling gulls shrieked from a faraway gust of air, and the jubilant sounds of laughing, painting children drifted through his head, and in that moment, Kalyd was passionately, painfully glad that he still lived.
*
He spoke of tributes whom he had never met, tributes he'd caught brief, terrifying flashes of in the darkness of the Gamemakers' caverns, tributes whose blood he had watched seep into the pores of the rocks cradling their empty corpses. He spoke of Mia Circuit, who'd fought courageously in a moment that he wished he could have witnessed, if only so he'd have some truer memory to relay rather than the digitized one that the world now shared; he spoke of Milo Periander, clever and quick, and he spoke of Roma Thorne, brilliant and brutal, and he spoke of Upton Snapper. Upton was most difficult to discuss, not because Kalyd had known him well but because the victor lingering in the shadows behind him, sporting an oversized silver crown that matched Kalyd's own, sniffled almost inaudibly the instant that Kalyd spoke his name. Because of that pitiable sound, and because of the accompanying twang that resonated in Kalyd's chest, he took more time than was necessary with Upton's eulogy, stretching out words that he hadn't expected to stumble from his tongue with such difficulty. First he said that Upton was brave and quick and brilliant, like the others; then, when this didn't seem quite right, Kalyd added, "He was a friend." He paused. "Not mine. But a friend all the same." And then, because this didn't seem quite right either, he thought of using a heavier word than "friend," but the word stuck in his throat and emerged diluted because it wasn't his to say. Instead of "beloved," it came out as "valued," and at that point a terrible noise burbled from American's throat that utterly arrested Kalyd for three seconds of dismal silence and he thought, for the briefest instant, that the person who sat behind him was Kalyd himself and that the man they were honoring was someone else entirely.
As Kalyd cleared his throat and stared deliberately into the polished wood of the podium, the world seemed to swim around him. "These are the tributes I fought with," he said, though he couldn't tell if the words emerged properly, if he spoke them aloud in the first place. "They were everything I said they were and more. They..."
His head felt light. His stomach felt weak. He was hundreds of years in the past, and he'd never re-awoken in the regeneration room at all.
"I...I need to honor someone else," said Kalyd, and he lifted his head to stare into the swirling darkness. Thousands of people sat within that shadowy mass, invisible; none of them truly knew him, and none of them cared. But he did not speak to them. His gaze penetrated the darkness, and Kalyd willed something in his nature to change from glass to silver, to reflect instead of transmit, to show a blind, beautiful man what he had once been and what he would always remain inside the most private chamber of Kalyd's being.
He paused. He swallowed.
"Let me tell you about Cammen Allele," he said.
*
His boat cut through the water like the shaft of a spear, and his eyes cut through the wavering air like a beam of light. The boat rocked, and tangled nets skittered across the bottom of the hull, sending gnats and flies into the quiet space behind Kalyd's ears; still, he rowed, and the sun dipped lower in the sky with every stroke.
Magenta illuminated the horizon, and evening had made the ocean rife with color—oranges and pinks streamed through the water beside Kalyd, and flecks of gold danced on the crests of distant waves. Along this stretch of water, the gulls were always silent, and so the only noises were the sloshing of Kalyd's oar through the sea, the faint buzzing of an errant gnat, and the creaking of the ancient boat itself. When Kalyd stopped rowing, the boat stopped creaking, and the gnat's whines faded into the distance; the world was now quiet enough for Kalyd to be able to truly listen.
He set the oar in the bottom of the boat, then leaned against the bow, his head resting on the battered prow. For a while, he only stared into the horizon, letting the breeze blow against his cheeks and the sound of lapping water fade in his perception. Then he spoke:
"I don't think I'm tired of this yet."
The world remained still, silent, and yet Kalyd glanced at the empty stern of the boat, where nets trailed over the sides and into the water. Suddenly, the back of the boat issued a sharp creak. A cloud of gnats stirred from beneath the seat. Kalyd smiled lazily.
"Maybe you're tired of it," he said, and he glanced back at the rippling reflection of the setting sun. "Maybe you were tired of it a long time ago. But I think"—and he paused, and he tilted his head to eye the back of the boat again—"I think if we've got each other, we'll be all right. Me with the view, you with me, me with you—all of that sounds good enough to me."
And the boat rocked, and the stern creaked, and the nets swayed in the water below.
"But you've got bigger things, don't you?" said Kalyd, staring into a passing wave. "You've always been bigger than me. Bigger than here. And I think that's okay."
One last time, he glanced at the stern of the boat. One last time, he smiled, eyes clouded over and chest feeling as if it might burst.
"Go on," he said, and the setting sun flashed behind him as it dipped beneath the horizon. "You've got my blessing."
And he covered his eyes with a hand, ducking so that the back of the boat couldn't see the way his face folded in on itself so terribly, and he released the last of his ghosts into the ether.
Kalyd Journeyman was not quite finished with life. When life was finished with him, he'd travel where his family and his friends had traveled hundreds of years prior, and he'd have no need for eulogies or magenta-hued goodbyes because nothing would ever have been lost there; past and future would live there together, both visible in the same glance, nothing hidden behind his back. But for now, he'd continue to live, and he'd continue to mourn, and he'd be happy in spite of the mourning—or perhaps because of it, because the sacrifice would make what remained all the sweeter.
Wiping his eyes, Kalyd began to row back to shore.