Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games) Summary & ending explained

My little brother wakes me the way he always does: he stands over the bed and breathes until I give up. Sid is ten and wants the woods at first light. It's my sixteenth birthday. It's also reaping day, and in District 12 nobody gets to enjoy both.

Ma is out back, stirring a kettle of other people's laundry. There's water to haul, cornbread to eat on the move, and a batch to finish for Hattie Meeney, who pays me to cook white liquor in the woods. As Seam lives go, mine isn't bad. I just have to get through the afternoon.

This year that's harder. It's the fiftieth Games, a Quarter Quell, and the Capitol is marking it by taking twice as many of us. Four from every district. Two boys, two girls.

I push the thought away and go to find Lenore Dove.

She's in the Meadow with her geese, singing something that would get her arrested if the wrong ears heard it. Lenore Dove is Covey, from the old families of wandering musicians, and she has never once kept quiet about the Capitol. She hands me a small package. Inside is a flint striker, worked into the shape of a bird twisting into a snake.

"So you can always make a fire," she says.

Then she starts in on the reaping. Why do we line up for it? Why does every district march its children into a square and wait?

"Because they've got the guns," I say. "It's just how things are."

"Things are how people let them be."

We've had this fight before. I kiss her instead of winning it, and for an hour nothing can touch us.

Then the bells ring, and we walk into town.

The square is silent. Drusilla Sickle, our Capitol escort, fishes in the bowls and reads the names out one by one. Louella McCoy, the little girl from next door who has followed me around like a sister since she could walk. Maysilee Donner, the merchant girl with the sharpest tongue in town. Wyatt Callow, whose family takes bets on the Games. Woodbine Chance.

Woodbine doesn't walk to the stage. He runs.

A rifle cracks from the roof of the Justice Building, and he goes down in the dust, and he doesn't get up.