payment page
Summary
Chapter 24
Maude Ivory confronts the young man, whose name is Billy Taupe, telling him to leave. He refuses rudely and drunkenly but quickly gives up. It seems like a crisis has been averted, until Billy shoves a Peacekeeper. All hell breaks loose, and the Hob becomes the arena of a huge, violent tussle between miners and Peacekeepers.
The next day, Coriolanus and Sejanus go to find Lucy Gray. They head toward the Seam, a very downtrodden part of the District, where they have heard Lucy lives. Coriolanus surprises Lucy as she sits playing guitar. They kiss, finally confessing their love to one another. Lucy invites Coriolanus inside her home, where they find several other Covey people talking about Billy Taupe. Billy is out back, drawing in the dirt and talking to Sejanus. He tries to swipe it away before Coriolanus sees, but it’s too late. He was drawing a map of the Peacekeeper base.
Chapter 25
Billy is cruel to Lucy about her relationship with Coriolanus, and she tells him sharply to leave and never come back. After he goes, the group sits down to eat, but Sejanus and Coriolanus are ushered out of the Covey's house after the meal. Dreading the answer, Coriolanus questions Sejanus about his conversation with Billy.
Sejanus admits to feeling connected to the rebels and asks Coriolanus if he thinks he’s being treasonous. Coriolanus says no, and they head back to the barracks. The next day, he and Sejanus are asked to help round up a hundred mockingjays and jabberjays for Dr. Gaul to study. A scientist called Dr. Kay leads the group, whom Coriolanus recognizes from Dr. Gaul’s lab. Coriolanus takes the officer test, and afterward, alone in the barracks, he succumbs to curiosity and goes through Sejanus’s locker. He finds sleeping capsules, a powerful painkiller called morphling and a huge stack of contraband money. He realizes that Sejanus has been lying the entire time he has been in District 12.
Chapter 26
Sejanus asks Coriolanus how the test went and says affectionately that he’s sure Coriolanus will pass. Coriolanus agrees outwardly, but turns Sejanus’s words over in his mind, thinking about how easily the other boy lies.
He’s relieved to be working with the birds again the next day, but his relief is quickly shattered when Dr. Kay addresses him alone in the woods. The conversation they have about jabberjays starts uneasily, but Coriolanus gets more comfortable when he learns that Dr. Kay had headed the colossally failed experiment of the spying birds. Coriolanus asks how the jabberjays work, and Dr. Kay demonstrates their uncanny ability to listen, repeat and record voices. Sejanus and Coriolanus head to the Hob, where they meet Lucy and the Covey backstage. Coriolanus gets drunk on moonshine, and privately scoffs at a song Maude Ivory and Lucy play. He’s about to voice his opinion to Sejanus when he notices his friend is nowhere to be seen.
Chapter 27
Coriolanus immediately suspects Sejanus of conspiring with rebels but doesn’t say so explicitly. The next day, Sejanus and a very hungover Coriolanus join Lucy and the Covey for the trip to the lake. The hike is beautiful, but Coriolanus can’t shake a sense of unease. At the lake, they swim and relax. He enjoys the water and Lucy’s company. They discuss his views on the Capitol and the enforcement of law. Lucy asks him who should decide which freedoms are sacrificed for safety.
Coriolanus asks Lucy if she misses Billy, and she explains why she doesn’t. Billy made a bet that he could have both her and Mayfair, and when Mayfair found out about it, she had Lucy selected to be Reaped. She also tells Coriolanus that Billy asked her to run away North with him, making Coriolanus furiously jealous. They return from the lake, and Coriolanus rushes to the Hob to find a missing Sejanus. Coriolanus finds him talking to a merchant selling weapons. He confronts Sejanus about his intentions but is brushed off. When Coriolanus is alone in the warehouse, Sejanus comes to him to confess something important. As Sejanus begins to speak, Coriolanus starts recording their conversation using a jabberjay and the remote he happens to be holding.
Analysis
Coriolanus is so delighted to see Lucy again at the Hob that he fails to pay proper attention to his surroundings; as ever, she destabilizes his ability to think clearly. Although he wants to protect her, he’s roped into escorting the mayor’s daughter, Mayfair, back home. Sejanus and a group of Peacekeepers go with him. Coriolanus is very unhappy about all of this because it represents more than just a missed opportunity: instead of being reunited with Lucy, he is with the wrong District 12 girl and is once again just one part of a homogenous group. There's no love lost between Coriolanus and Mayfair, and he certainly isn't a fan of Billy Taupe. However, it’s notable that Coriolanus has the perfect opportunity to betray Billy to the Peacekeepers and doesn't take it. When they arrive at Mayfair’s house, Coriolanus sees Billy through her lighted window. Although he's extremely critical of any actions Sejanus takes that aren't aligned with the goals of the Peacekeepers, he's willing to bend his own rules if he thinks it will help Lucy. At this point, like many others in A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the reader sees that rules Coriolanus applies strictly to other people don’t always apply to him.
Although Coriolanus had been suspicious of Sejanus for some time, the immensity of Sejanus’s betrayal truly hits him when he finds of the contraband in Sejanus's locker. Coriolanus certainly has his moral qualms with the Hunger Games and some of the Capitol’s practices, but he's also fascinated by the work that Dr. Gaul and her colleagues are doing. He’s excited by progress on genetic mutation, as is evidenced by his long conversation with Dr. Kay about the jabberjays.
All of the correspondence and conversations he's had with Dr. Gaul about human nature being inherently chaotic have been very influential on Coriolanus, in a way that he doesn’t seem to see clearly. They have led him to despise chaos in any form in his own life. He has begun to believe that the results of an action can justify the action itself, however brutal it might be. He had thought for a long time that Sejanus was a friend he could trust, and so his disappointment when he realizes this isn't the case is far more serious than it would be with another person. Sejanus’s betrayal means he can’t trust him any longer, and with that loss, yet another established structure in Coriolanus’s life crumbles unexpectedly away.
Coriolanus hates the mockingjays for their spontaneity and sees them as embodying the kind of chaos the Capitol is designed to prevent. The fact that it was a mistake that the mockingjays were created is not the issue: he understands why it happened and that it was impossible to predict. The problem for Coriolanus is that the results of that one mistake have multiplied into an unpredictable, unsolvable problem. The jabberjays are useful, and he likes them because they have a specific, defined purpose. They are easy to control—apart from their mating habits—and the sounds they produce have predictable patterns. They are orderly and adhere to a system of actions and consequences, qualities that Coriolanus believes should govern all living things. Because of the painful and unpredictable events of his childhood, combined with the negative feelings he has about the Districts from the war, the spontaneity of the mockingjays’ chaotic sounds bothers him. Mockingjays don't just repeat human speech; they also repeat the things they hear from other mockingjays. This means that their calls aren’t limited by human action. When a mockingjay picks up a sound, it can multiply it out of all control, stacking and harmonizing endlessly as more birds join in. Coriolanus is terrified of unpredictable things affecting his future—a justifiable fear when one takes into account the events of his life. The mockingjays represent this possibility for him, and he despises them for it.
When Coriolanus finally accuses Sejanus of working with the rebels and conspiring against the Capitol, the two boys come to an impasse in their morals. Sejanus is annoyed at the probing but realizes that he won't be able to trick Coriolanus into leaving the issue alone. He tells Coriolanus that Lil—the girl from the hanging—is imprisoned at the Peacekeeper base. Coriolanus is furious and accuses Sejanus of being a rebel informant, but Sejanus protests that the Covey just want to know if Lil is alright. \Sejanus knows that what he is doing is possibly treasonous and definitely against the rules, but because he believes that it’s a reasonable request on the part of the rebels, he's willing to help them.. Coriolanus, on the other hand, has a far more rigid definition of what acceptable behavior looks like. The fact that Sejanus would align himself with people from the Districts is to Coriolanus a moral violation in itself. All the rest of Sejanus’s actions are just salt in the wound.
