Madge Undersee had grown up under the quiet shadow of fear. In the mayor’s house, fear didn’t wear the face of hunger or cold like it did in the Seam. It lingered in whispers, in silences that lasted too long, in her mother’s trembling hands.

Merrilee Undersee, bedridden with headaches that left her pale and ghostly, would sometimes wake in the night clutching Madge’s fingers with startling strength. Her voice, fever-rough, spoke of things no child should hear: her sister Maysilee’s Reaping, the Capitol’s gleaming stage, the sound of a cannon in the 50th Hunger Games. “Not even wealth can save us, Madge,” her mother would insist, eyes wild. “Not from them. Not in Panem.”

For years, Madge carried that refrain like a half-remembered nightmare. She told herself she was safe, her name barely in the bowl, her family’s status a shield against the desperation that drove Seam children into tesserae. Year after year she stood in the square, the mockingjay pin hidden beneath her collar, watching other girls climb the stage. Poorer girls. Seam girls. Never her.

Until Effie Trinket reached into the glass ball.

“And this year’s female tribute… Madge Undersee!”

Her name cracked the air like a trap springing shut. The world went white at the edges. Her legs refused to move until her frail mother, trembling, yet suddenly fierce, pushed her forward, shoving her down the aisle toward the stage. For one unbearable second, Madge wondered if this was what her mother had always known would come. If this was the curse finally finding its way home.

She only half-heard the next name. A boy’s. The baker’s son. She knew him in the way all merchant children knew each other: polite nods, shared streets, bread handed across a counter with shy, floury hands. He was kind. Too kind to die.

And yet here they both were, two ghosts already standing in the sun.

The Justice Building blurred: her father’s mask of grief, her mother’s broken sobs as Peacekeepers dragged her away. Katniss came too, fierce and steady, her gray eyes unflinching. She seized Madge’s hands with a grip sharp as iron. “Find a bow,” Katniss whispered, urgent. “It’s your only chance.”

But what chance was there, really?

Later, in the train’s golden dining car, dishes gleamed like cruel mockery, enough food to feed half of District 12, wasted here on two children marked for slaughter. Madge sat across from the baker’s boy, her hands hovering, trembling, over untouched plates. Neither of them could eat. The silence between them was thick, broken only by the low, relentless hum of the Capitol-bound engine.

At last, Madge’s voice broke the stillness, soft and halting, as though the cameras were already listening.

“Do you… have a symbol?” she asked, fingers brushing the mockingjay pin at her chest. “Something to remind you who you are? Because… I have this. It was my aunt’s. But—” Her throat caught, the words fracturing. “I don’t know if I can wear it. If you need it… it should be yours.”