Summary
As Chapter 13 opens, Coryo is leaving his final discussion with Lucy. He has just given her his mother's silver compact - both as a memento and as a way of storing poison - and she kisses him on the lips before their meeting is over. The next day, the Hunger Games events begin in earnest, with several competitors already dead and Capitol weatherman Lucretius "Lucky" Flickerman presiding over the broadcast. Mentors are equipped with personal devices called communicuffs, which enable the mentors to track the sponsor gifts that are being sent to the tributes. For his part, Coryo also strikes up an alliance with Lysistrata Vickers, whose District 12 tribute Jessup has already bonded with Lucy.
Clemensia Dovecote also returns from the hospital to assume her mentoring duties; she hides her skin, though, and remains sickly. Then, the 10th Hunger Games opens on a gory sight: Marcus, battered, captured, and suspended in the air in the middle of the arena. He is, however, still alive.
Chapter 14 traces the impact of Marcus's capture. Coryo himself is disturbed, and Sejanus denounces the citizens of the Capitol as "monsters" before rushing out of the Academy. Then, the tributes are released into the arena. Most scatter, but a District 7 girl named Lamina uses an ax to end Marcus's life, an apparent act of mercy. Otherwise, the first day is mostly uneventful. Reaper, the powerful District 11 male tribute, seems to be hunting the other contestants, and the tech-savvy District 3 tributes retrieve a pair of drones for mysterious purposes.
Coryo returns home and finds Sejanus's mother, or "Ma Plinth," at the Snow family's apartment. She explains that her son has not returned home. As Coryo and Ma Plinth watch the end-of-the-day broadcast of the Games, they see a tall male figure emerge. Ma Plith recognizes the figure as Sejanus.
In Chapter 15, Dr. Gaul places a call to the Snows and orders Coryo to go to the arena, with the intention of retrieving Sejanus. She is convinced that sending in Coryo - a presumed friend of the troubled young man - will be more effective than sending Peacekeepers. Coryo enters the darkened arena and makes his way to Sejanus; the onetime resident of District 2 voices his contempt for his father - a war profiteer who uses money to solve problems - and seems eager to give his life to make a statement. Instead, Coryo agrees to help Sejanus remove Marcus's body. The two are walking through the gloom when a knife-wielding tribute, Bobbin, attacks.
Coryo successfully defends himself against Bobbin early in Chapter 16. Using a board, he beats the tribute to death; he and Sejanus, both injured, escape from the arena with minimal assistance from the nearby Peacekeepers. After he emerges, Coryo is confronted by Dr. Gaul, who seems mostly unbothered by Coryo's near-death experience. She, in fact, sees Coryo's experience with violence as a useful lesson in the ability of Chaos to erupt and the need for social control in order to avoid such desperate circumstances.
When Coryo returns to the Academy, he finds the state of the Games somewhat changed. A few of the stronger tributes, including a pair from District 4, have formed an alliance. Coryo himself is now fixated on winning the recently-announced Plinth Prize, an award newly created by Sejanus's father; this prize will honor the winning Hunger Games mentor with a full University scholarship. Unfortunately, Lucy's odds of winning take a strange turn when her own ally, Jessup from District 12, begins rushing around the arena in a state of illness and disorientation.
Jessup's illness is revealed to be rabies as Chapter 17 opens. He chases after Lucy Gray and follows her into the stands of the arena; Coryo and Jessup's mentor Lysistrata Vickers realize that Jessup is doomed, so they team up to figure out how to help Lucy win. Remembering that rabies results in "hydrophobia" (fear of water), they begin sending drones carrying water bottles. This ploy causes Jessup to plummet from the arena stands to his death. Lucy is there when he dies and collects as much of the food and water as she can. She then flees, as the remaining tributes wander the arena. Coryo eventually returns home, only to find an official notice with an ominous meaning: the Snows are likely to lose their apartment to new Capitol taxation laws.
As Chapter 18 begins, the reality of the Snows' desperate situation settles in for Coryo. Winning the Plinth prize is now his best hope of redeeming or rescuing his family. The next day of the Games features little in terms of Lucy, but the trident-wielding tributes from the nautical District 4 kill off a few of their competitors. Meanwhile, Reaper from District 11 begins placing the bodies in a neat row and makes a cape out of a Capitol flag draped in the arena. After the day's events conclude, Coryo heads to Dr. Gaul's laboratory, where he learns that a mentor named Gaius Breen had died from injuries sustained during the arena bombing. Dr. Gaul then leaves Coryo alone, and Coryo comes across a tank full of deadly snakes - reptiles destined for the arena. Hoping to rescue Lucy from a gruesome death, he drops a handkerchief - which bears her scent, and which may thus keep the snakes from attacking her - into the tank.
Analysis
With these chapters, Collins doesn't exactly broaden the world of Panem, though she does bring a background element of the Hunger Games trilogy into the foreground. Readers of the three books that focus on Katniss Everdeen and the Districts have witnessed the action of the Hunger Games mostly from within the arena; now, the focus has shifted to the mentors and sponsors. Reimagine the original The Hunger Games from Haymitch Abernathy's perspective, or Catching Fire from Plutarch Heavensbee's, and you would have something similar. The Hunger Games is now a spectator sport, but the squabbling and strategizing of the mentors make for interesting psychological drama.
The responses of those spectators, mentors and otherwise, exist on a spectrum that runs from approving (Dr. Gaul) to aghast (Sejanus). Coryo occupies something of a middle region, with his strong reaction to the sight of Marcus's mutilated body: "Coriolanus felt ill but incapable of looking away. It would have been horrifying to see any creature displayed this way - dog, a monkey, a rat, even - but a boy?" (Ballad, 206.) As the Games progress, though, Coryo ceases to linger on or agonize over individual acts of violence. It could be that the spectacle of Marcus is singularly impactful, or that the necessity of keeping Lucy alive eventually overwhelms all other considerations. Unfortunately, it is also possible that Coryo's acceptance of the carnage of the Games is a tacit commentary on the desensitizing nature of nonstop exposure to violence - or a sign of a sociopath in the making.
This final reading connects to the major action scene - the rescue of Sejanus - that places Coriolanus in peril. Bobbin's attack does give Coryo's reaction an air of necessary self-defense, but the lessons that Coryo takes from the experience make his reaction rather ominous. When Dr. Gaul asks him about the experience, his response - "Chaos happens. What else is there to say" - sets off one of her lessons in political domination: "Start with that. Chaos. No control, no law, no government at all. Like being in the arena. Where do we go from there?" (Ballad, 244.) Coriolanus, in fact, goes on to write a paper on exactly these ideas. His ability to take life-or-death violence as a fascinating intellectual construct is not yet as uncanny as Dr. Gaul's, but it's getting there.
Some of the other mentors, though, seem more capable of lasting empathy and humanity. For instance, Lysistrata Vickers offers a pointed commentary on the death of her tribute Jessup: "What I'd like people to know about Jessup is that he was a good person. He threw his body over mine to protect me when the bombs started going off in the arena. It wasn't even conscious. He did it reflexively. That's who he was at heart. A protector" (Ballad, 262.) Jessup, here, is celebrated for his special strengths of character. In fact, those moral strengths would be competitive weaknesses in the Hunger Games; as Lysistrata explains, Jessup was unlikely to win in any case since he was so determined to protect Lucy Gray.
Jessup in this construction presents an intriguing, though not absolute, foil to Coriolanus himself. Both of these young men have Lucy's safety in mind, but the seeming purity of a "protector" like Jessup contrasts with the calculations and conflicts of a self-promoter like Coriolanus. Without Dr. Gaul's threats, would Coryo risk his life for Sejanus? Without a win in the Hunger Games on the line, would Coryo tamper with the snake tank in order to save Lucy? The novel does not directly answer these questions and instead gestures towards the moral middle ground that Coriolanus occupies. He may genuinely care about the well-being of his fellow student and his alluring tribute, but it is not clear that he cares enough to help them in a reflexive, purely self-sacrificing manner.
