Augusta Byron

## Bio

*Augusta Byron (she/her). District Three Tribute. 20. Ashlei Sharp Chestnut.*

Augusta Byron was born the middle child to Metric and Lourdes Byron. Lourdes was originally from District One, but when she fell in love with a man from District Three, she gave up that life to follow him. He was an engineer and his lifestyle was very different to the family she’d known, but they made it work. Their love saw them through, and saw them have three beautiful children that they loved very much. At least, that was the fairytale that Augie liked to believe. In truth, her parents fought a lot, and her mom seemed perpetually unhappy. Augie got along with her sister and brother, but they weren’t close, or at least not as close as some of the other families Augie knew.

The area of the city in which the Byrons lived was not the poorest, not by far, but it wasn’t the industrial hubbub one might expect of the District. Nearly everyone was a mechanic or an engineer. Tech was hard to come by, too expensive, and tech jobs moreso, especially without even an informal background.

As Augie grew up she spent more and more time out of the house, as did her sister. But where her sister had friends and sleepovers and game nights, Augie had a computer she had discovered in the school basement, dimly lit and clacking, occasionally requiring a slap in order to properly boot up. The school itself was overcrowded, so the teachers were too overworked and underpaid to give Augie and her basement break-ins the time of day, or the time of night. Eventually, someone left a key on the table, so that Augie could lock up when she was done. She taught herself to code, and found solace in the logic of the lines.

She had hoped at one point to be able to go to college for coding, but when she brought it up her father laughed in her face. Her mother was quiet and somber, and Augie fought with her dad while he tried to insist she become an engineer, just like him. She was the smartest of the Byrons, he said, and could work her way up. But Augie never wanted that. She didn’t want any of this life, and spent far too many hours daydreaming about what could have been had her mother been able to stay with her family, to raise Augie and her siblings in the luxury of District One.

The Games were a plague on Panem, but one everyone had to deal with. Augie grew up watching them every six months, and from them she learned that bloodshed was just another part of the bad hand everyone had already been dealt.  Reaping days were the worst, and Augie found herself terrified of them, but while Three wasn’t the biggest District, it wasn’t so small in size or population that she knew anyone who was Reaped. Every year, it was other names that were drawn, and Augie would watch the horrors unfold on the small screen in their living room with a certain amount of security that she was safe for another six months.

Still, she had the sinking suspicion that she or her siblings would be the first in their sphere of influence. Someone had to be.

When Augie was reaped, surprisingly, the emotions she felt were sadness and anger, not fear - at least, not at first. But the fear snuck in on the way to the Capitol, after her mother gave her a necklace, gold with three pearls that Augie never even knew she had, as a token - and then she was terrified. Augie studied logic. It was her only hobby. And logic told Augie that she didn’t stand a chance.

*+ intelligent, determined, resilient*

*- stubborn, wistful, despondent*

**PENNED BY: Greta**