The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (A Hunger Games Novel) (The Hunger Games)

but she had a sweetness, a vulnerability that invited abuse.

I keep asking myself why you did it.”

Not much choice, really, thought Coriolanus. “He’s my friend,” he said.

What else might he be capable of? Well, that was it. It stopped now. If he didn’t have honor, he had nothing. No more deception. No more shady strategies. No more rationalization. From now on he’d live honestly, and if he ended up as a beggar, at least he would be a decent one.

Did you tell your best friend his crush was a cannibal? Never a rule book when you needed one.

“What happened in the arena? That’s humanity undressed. The tributes. And you, too. How quickly civilization disappears. All your fine manners, education, family background, everything you pride yourself on, stripped away in the blink of an eye, revealing everything you actually are. A boy with a club who beats another boy to death. That’s mankind in its natural state.”

They’d been close enough to recognize him. But they’d hunted down him and Sejanus — Sejanus, who’d treated the tributes so well, fed them, defended them, given them last rites! — even though they could have used that opportunity to kill one another.

“I started out as a medical doctor, you know,” she said. “Obstetrics.”

How awful, Coriolanus thought. To have you be the first person in the world a baby sees.

If you ever needed proof of the districts’ backwardness, there you had it. Primitive people with their primitive customs. How much bread had they wasted with this nonsense? Oh, no, he starved to death! Somebody get the bread!

“It really would be like having you with me, wouldn’t it?”

“Go on,” he urged her. “Take me with you. Take it.”

“Then be kind, Coryo,” she snapped. “And try not to look down on people who had to choose between death and disgrace.”