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Summary
Chapter 8
Clemensia’s hand spurts neon pus from the bite, and she quickly becomes unconscious after receiving an injection from lab assistants. She’s trundled off my medics, and Dr. Gaul questions Coriolanus about the proposal he submitted. She approves and says she plans to implement a version of it. She also warns him against lying in the future. Coriolanus, feeling overwhelmed and fearful, rushes out of the building past some horrible live experiments of Dr. Gaul’s and runs to the Capitol Hospital to check on Clemensia. He can hear her screaming when he arrives and learns she might survive with possible neurological damage. Even more distressed, Coriolanus visits Lucy Gray at the zoo and sees that the tributes have all been chained up after the attack on Arachne. The tributes are being starved, and so Lucy devours the crackers he brings her and tells him she’s made an ally in the other District 12 tribute, Jessup. Coriolanus is forced to leave by the Peacekeepers after telling Lucy that she matters to him. He worries about how weak she’s getting from lack of food. Although he tries, he’s too tired to formulate a plan to help her as he walks home.
Chapter 9
Tigris wakes a sleeping Coriolanus and tells him Satyria Click, a professor of his at the Academy, has called several times. He eats the soup she gives him and discusses his traumatic experiences at the lab and his concerns about Lucy. Later, he attends Arachne’s funeral, where he’s been asked to sing the national anthem in mourning for her. A flatbed drives past, where the tributes have been chained together and the corpse of Brandy, Arachne’s attacker, swings grimly above them attached to a crane. After a very uncomfortable exchange with Dean Highbottom, he returns to the Academy. The mentors are informed about their mandatory role in a live tour of the Hunger Games arena with their tributes, which will be broadcast across Panem. The Capitol wants to make Arachne seem like a martyr. The group arrives at the enormous, bomb-cratered Arena, and walks around the perimeter of the oval. Coriolanus manages to slip Lucy the sandwich he’s brought her, and they’re laughing together when a huge explosion detonates.
Chapter 10
Coriolanus flies backward through the air and falls to the ground from the force of the bomb going off. More explode in other places around the stadium. Lucy saves Coriolanus from the burning beam he is trapped under. Peacekeepers arrive, and Coriolanus is hospitalized. When he wakes, his grandmother and Tigris are sitting at his bedside. They inform him that many tributes and mentors were killed or maimed. They also recount that Marcus, Sejanus’s dangerous District 2 tribute, has escaped. Tigris doesn’t know what has happened to Lucy, and Coriolanus is frantic with worry. A string of visitors file in, and then just as he falls asleep, a haggard Clemensia appears at his bedside. She is terrified Gaul will kill her, and her skin is turning scaly and reptilian. She’s dragged away by Peacekeepers. The next day, footage of the lavish funeral the Capitol gives their dead mentors plays on all channels. Coriolanus is released to go home, but he returns to school the next day for a meeting with Lucy. She thanks him for saving her life, and he, bewildered, thanks her for the same thing. She makes an audacious demand, and knowing he’ll always be in her debt otherwise, he agrees.
Analysis
The brutal attack on Clemensia by Dr. Gaul’s snakes is a perfect example of how Dr. Gaul treats everything as a game. Clemensia is only bitten because Dr. Gaul predicted that Coriolanus would lie about her participation in the proposal. The snakes that bite her aren’t the usual boring colors of reptilian brown or green: they’re glowing neon. When they bite Clemensia, she doesn’t just swell up, instead exploding with colorful pus. It’s all a spectacle and is all designed to shock and awe Coriolanus into respecting Dr. Gaul’s machinations and doing as she says. This interaction is a microcosm of the human experiments Dr. Gaul runs in the arena proper. It is designed to gauge how Coriolanus will respond to stress, both before and after the lie is discovered.
The reader also sees several facets of the devotion Coriolanus's family feels toward him in this section. It's clear that both Tigris and the Grandma'am are totally oriented toward ensuring his success. They'll do this even if they starve, freeze, or have to resort to humiliating work. The Grandma'am is worried that Coriolanus is becoming too familiar with Lucy. This isn't just a class issue, though that's part of it—she's concerned that he will allow his personal feelings to get in the way of the success he's worked so hard for. The Capitol is not a society where everyone is given equal opportunities, especially in a wartime economy. Tigris also knows she has to do whatever it takes to protect Coriolanus. She must guard his reputation as carefully as she does her own. If he isn't able to ascend socially, those same doors close for her forever. All of her hopes are placed on him, as there isn’t much call for haute couture designers like her in Panem’s current state of affairs.
The social environment of the Capitol is not the only place that seems bleak and brutal in this section. We're introduced to the Arena where the Hunger Games will take place in Chapter 9. The author tells us it hasn't had any sort of cleanup done since the war. Because of the bombing that happens at the end of this chapter, the physical structure of the Arena itself fundamentally changes. It’s a new and improved stadium for violence, perfect for Dr. Gaul’s similarly new and improved version of the Hunger Games this year. Previously the arena had been much easier to navigate. It was simply an enormous stadium, without many of the cracks, nooks, and crannies that the bombing has created. After the bombs go off, it becomes an environment with a maze of unfamiliar spaces and textures, one which contains both new hiding places and new obstacles. It's ironic that the first and last time the mentors and tributes enter the Arena together is also the only time where mentors and tributes die simultaneously in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. The series of bombs that go off in the rebel attack don't discriminate between Capitol and tribute bodies. This bombing makes it painfully clear to Sejanus that the only difference between himself and the children who are about to be publicly killed comes from his father's achievements in selling armaments. He feels ashamed and complicit, feelings which will only grow stronger over time.
The lavish funerals the Capitol gives its dead sons and daughters also hammer home the hatred between the Districts and their rulers. When a tribute dies during the main event of the Hunger Games, they are not removed from the Arena until the Games are over. As stated in Chapter 9, any blood that's spilled from a tribute in the Arena is not even cleaned up by the denizens of the Capitol. "Wind and rain might wash away the bloodstains," the narrator tells the reader, "but Capitol hands would not." After the bombing, the people of the Districts have to watch an incredibly lavish series of televised funerals. These ludicrously expensive state affairs are to honor the people who were going to supervise the deaths of their children. Adding insult to injury, they also know that after the Games start, the bodies of their own children will lie rotting on the sand of the Arena until the entertainments are finished. Arachne and the others are rushed to hospital and lie dead surrounded by lilies, while the blood of the District children won't even be cleaned off the rocks.
