Chapter Text
I’m comforted to reach the center of the arena. It feels more strategic to have everything in view like this—at least, everything I can know for sure. Thanks to Finnick with his bread and lifesaving, and Johanna’s clumsy redirect over the wire, I get the impression our fellow tributes had a more thorough briefing from Haymitch. Of course, whatever they know, they can’t chance telling me—not with cameras following us every moment. I resolve to watch them close as I can, see what else I can pick up.
I settle Beetee in the small patch of blistering shade beneath the Cornucopia, and set Wiress the task of cleaning off the wire, which is still a giant, disgusting blood clot. It’s starting to stink. Wiress is transformed now that she’s communicated about the clock. She moves with the scampering lightness of a child, eyes bright and focused again. She picks up singing as she swirls the coil around in the water:
“Hickory, dickory, dock
The mouse ran up the clock
The clock struck one,
The mouse ran down,
Hickory, dickory, dock!”
Johanna rolls her eyes so hard it looks painful. “Oh, not the song again. That went on for hours before she started tick-tocking.”
Wiress stands up straight and points out at the jungle. “Two.” White fog has begun to bleed from the tree line. I shiver, my skin prickling with remembered numbness.
Katniss will not let Johanna land a single punch with Wiress. “Yes, look, Wiress is right,” she says, loudly, pointing out what everyone's already staring at. “It’s two o’clock and the fog has started.”
“Like clockwork” I say, to back her up. “You were very smart to figure that out, Wiress.”
She smiles, and I swear there’s a twinge of parental benevolence to it. Like if she could speak the way she wanted, she would say, Thank you, and I won’t mention how slow you all were to notice it. She returns to both the song and the wire-washing. I swallow a smile.
“Oh, she’s more than smart. She’s intuitive,” says Beetee from the Cornucopia shade. It’s the first full sentence we’ve gotten out of him today, so attention turns to him, and the conversation to coal mine canaries. Johanna wanders off at the first opportunity, allergic as she is to anything Nuts and Volts. Once she sets in on testing the heft of various weapons from the Cornucopia, her mood seems to improve. Before long, Katniss and Finnick join her to pick over the mess of weapons.
I don’t think I’m going to find much I can use any better than my knives, but in the spirit of collecting knowledge, I decide to draw us a map of the jungle. I’ve brought some of the large leaves Finnick was tearing into strips for his bowls. They mark up pretty well with the tip of a knife.
As Beetee relaxes against the Cornucopia and closes his eyes again, I trace out a twelve-wedge pie with a circle at the center for the Cornucopia. I draw a wavy circle about two-thirds of the way in to represent the waterline, and then a thick, solid one around the border to mark the force field edge.
Next, I need to label the wedges’ hazards. The tip of the leaf for twelve o’clock, I decide. But the drawing needs a Cornucopia; it’s so bare without. I glance up at the metal horn to get a sense of it for my sketch, and notice then which way the tail points. Fog spills out onto the beach two sections to the left of it. The tail's aimed right at a tall tree on the hill crest.
Ah. So the Gamemakers have given us a compass.
Katniss comes up beside me, flush with fresh arrows, to see what I’m working on.
“Look how the Cornucopia’s positioned,” I say to her, pointing at my drawing and then at the thing itself.
“The tail points toward twelve o’clock,” she realizes.
“Right. So, this is the top of our clock,” I say, beginning at the top wedge on my leaf and writing in one through twelve around the outside. “Twelve to one is the lightning zone.” I write that in the jungle section of the circle, then continue around for the hazards we know. Blood, fog, monkeys. Katniss is excited. She points out where the wave should go as Johanna and Finnick join us, bristling with enough weapons to outfit a squadron of Peacekeepers.
“Did you notice anything unusual in the others?” Katniss asks Johanna and Beetee, who’s opened his eyes again to examine my map with interest.
“Just blood,” says Johanna flatly. “Oh, and the giant deadly force field.”
“It took us some time to get back to the beach, after the blood rain,” Beetee elaborates. “Between the dark, and our injuries.”
I suppose it’s been barely more than a day.“I’m going to mark the ones where we know the Gamemakers’ weapon follows us out past the jungle, so we’ll stay clear of those” I say, crossing off the beach section beneath fog and wave.
Then I sit back and frown at the map, some of the excitement ebbing. It feels bare. Not because it lacks art; because we are missing so much information. Five wedges filled, but seven blank, and of course, we have no idea where the rest of the tributes have gotten off to.
“Well, it’s a lot more than we knew this morning, anyway,” I say, trying to talk myself back onto the positive side. Things could be way worse. I trust our allies almost as much as I trust Katniss--at least, I trust that Haymitch trusts them. We know where we are on the map. We have control of the Cornucopia. Really—we’re doing better than most Career packs, and we're doing better than I thought we would for a Quell. Especially this Quell. There's a lot to work with.
Then Katniss stiffens.
I don’t know what clues her in, but she turns and loads an arrow in one movement, and there, down by the beach, is Gloss from District One, throwing a bloodied Wiress aside like a dog tossing away a freshly killed bird.
In one breath, it’s a melee. Katniss’s arrow finds Gloss’s temple, and he’s down. As soon as Cashmere's clear of the Cornucopia tail, Johanna buries an axe in her chest, and she’s down too. Brutus I register as only a sort of rushing change of air. A spear clatters next to me, upsetting the map as I grasp for my knife. Finnick grunts as he takes a blade to the thigh. Enobaria—I straighten, knife in hand, just in time to see her take cover behind the Cornucopia.
Boom—boom—boom—the Gamemakers confirm that Wiress, Gloss, and Cashmere have left us for good, so Katniss, Johanna, Finnick, and I leap after Brutus and Enobaria. They’re already sprinting hard as they can down the nearest sand strip, but Katniss, Johanna, and Finnick all use ranged weapons. They won't make it. I hesitate a step, thinking maybe I should hang back with Beetee, just in case there are others—
And then the ground goes out from under my feet.
The island is spinning. Fast, fast, faster—I’m flung outward, and barely catch myself in time on a protruding boulder. The world blurs into blues and greens and white stinging sand. I don’t know how long it goes on. It stops just as suddenly as it starts, and the jolt almost sends me into the water for good. But I’ve just barely hung on.
Katniss, Johanna, and Finnick rise, sputtering, from the sand. Brutus and Enobaria are gone, and so is Beetee. We spot him floating a couple dozen yards out in the water, looking waterlogged and precarious, barely keeping his head up. Finnick dives after him at once.
Meanwhile, Katniss is looking around the ground with rising panic. Pretty much everything we weren’t carrying has washed out to sea. At first I think she’s looking for my map, but then her eyes lock on Wiress. Floating on her back out there, past Beetee. She looks like Ophelia did, so small in the grip of the sparkling ocean. Something glimmers in her still-clasped hands.
The wire.
“Cover me,” Katniss snaps, shedding her weapons. Johanna and I follow her down the nearest land strip, Johanna keeping an eye on the jungle and I on the Cornucopia. My heart’s in my throat. Anything that’s with a tribute’s corpse when they die gets taken out of the Games, and we can’t lose that wire. I know it must really be important, because Johanna’s expression is grim, set, pale—and not just from the spinning.
A hovercraft blinks into view over Wiress. Its propulsors stir up the water into mist. Come on, come on! I will Katniss. She’s swimming as hard as she can. Racing the claw as it descends.
She just makes it.
She swims right into Wiress, flails with the body for a moment, and then comes away with the wire in her hand. The hovercraft barely waits for her to clear the scene. I’m worried the claw is going to hit her, for a split second. But it closes around only Wiress.
And then the District Three tribute is gone, spirited away into the sky, before I’ve truly registered what happened. Just a moment ago, she was singing. The way she smiled at us, with that sparkle in her eye. In the space of two minutes, she’s been snuffed out. She’ll never smile again.
We gather back on the edge of the Cornucopia island. Beetee’s sputtering but alive. He accepts the wire back from Katniss with both hands, and stares down at it wordlessly. It’s sparkling clean, no trace of blood, a beautiful pale gold.
Katniss crosses to me and wraps her arms so tight around my chest that it’s hard to breathe. She presses her head against my collarbone. She doesn’t hide her face against my body like she’s done in past, like in the Victory Tour. She doesn’t dare--in case another threat pops up while she’s not looking.
I drop my chin into her wet braids and breathe in the musky salt that’s overwhelmed her usual leather-and-pine smell. I can tell she’s trying not to visibly shake. So am I. Death strikes like a viper in this arena. So sudden. Even the gentle moments are not safety.
“Let’s get off this stinking island,” Johanna finally mutters.
We collect our things swiftly and silently—there’s not much left, even inside the Cornucopia, where moments ago stood racks of weapons. Finnick binds off the knife wound in his thigh with his undershirt, and doesn’t even make a show of going shirtless. That's how I know he's spooked too.
I offer my back to Beetee again, but he refuses with a raised, trembling hand. “I can walk. If we move slowly. You need your hands free to defend us.” I’m not sure I believe him, but he’s right about the defense thing.
“We should head for the lightning wedge,” Johanna says. “It’s middle of the afternoon, so it’ll be hours before we have to worry about it going off again.”
“Good idea,” says Finnick. “And it’s far enough away from the poison fog.”
We all nod in agreement. Then, Johanna, Finnick, and I start off in three different directions.
“Twelve o’clock, right?” I say. “The tail points at twelve.”
“Before they spun us,” Finnick points out. “I was judging by the sun.”
“The sun only tells you it’s going on four, Finnick,” says Katniss, irritated.
Beetee steps in. “I think Katniss’s point is knowing the time doesn’t mean you necessarily know where four is on the clock. You might have a general idea of the direction. Unless you consider that they may have shifted the outer ring of the jungle as well.”
I shake my head a little, trying to make sense of this, but it’s no use. I’m several steps behind--it would never have occurred to me to navigate using the sun in the first place.
Katniss nods, but I can tell she has no idea what he’s talking about either, and is just trying to act confident. “Yes, so any one of these paths could lead to twelve o’clock,” she says, which is really the main point.
And the main dilemma. We circle carefully around the edge of the island, examining the jungle, but they’ve taken pains to make the place incomprehensible. Katniss thinks to look for the lightning tree, but there’s a tall tree in every wedge. Johanna examines the sandy strips for Enobaria and Brutus’s tracks, but their footprints have been washed away by the island’s spinning.
Without going anywhere, we’ve managed to get completely lost.
Katniss scuffs a show against the sand and scowls out at the uniform jungle in frustration. “I should never have mentioned the clock. Now they’ve taken that advantage away as well.”
“Only temporarily,” Beetee assures her. “At ten, we’ll see the wave again and be back on track.”
“Yes,” I agree, “They can’t redesign the whole arena.”
Katniss gives me a look that says, How can you be sure? And honestly, I can’t. I regret saying it immediately.
That’s when Johanna cuts in. “It doesn’t matter. You had to tell us or we never would have moved our camp in the first place, brainless.”
Her tone’s as rude as ever, but this is the only thing that seems to take any of the tension out of Katniss’s shoulders. And it’s a good point, after all. We had to get off the beach before the fog. It’s interesting, I think, to see how Johanna wields her blunt personality. She’s got about as many kind bones in her body as my mother. I can’t say I particularly like her. But it's so obvious her anger's bigger than us. She's furious with a villain she'll never be able to touch. The Capitol. And that makes it hard to take any of it too personally.
In the end, we choose a land strip at random and return to the jungle. We’re wary of the forest edge at first, but nothing seems to be stirring in the dark shade of the trees. No fog, no muttations, no rain that isn’t rain. Just the burning heat, made worse by the fact that we haven’t had fresh water since the spinning cornucopia flung all our grass bowls into the sea.
“Well, it must be monkey hour,” I say at last. “And I don’t see any of them in there. I’m going to try to tap a tree.”
“No, it’s my turn,” says Finnick immediately, which is ridiculous, because we weren’t on a rotation.
“I’ll at least watch your back,” I say.
“Katniss can do that,” Johanna cuts in. “We need you to make another map. The other washed away.”
She yanks a leaf off the nearest tree—not even the right kind of leaf—and stuffs it in my face. It’s hard not to roll my eyes. They’re not even trying to hide it anymore, the shielding me from harm. It’s starting to cross the line into insult. I didn’t train for three months straight, didn’t drag Katniss and Haymitch out of bed every goddamn morning for calisthenics, just to be treated like fine china.
Worse, Katniss agrees to this. As she goes, she keeps looking back over her shoulder at me, until the foliage closes in and she can’t anymore. Like she agrees with the other tributes, that my safety is most important. When it isn’t. I made Haymitch promise it wouldn’t be.
Except, they keep protecting me anyway.
Suddenly, powerfully, my greatest fear surges up in my throat, almost too strong to choke down. That Haymitch is double crossing me. That he promised her, and lied to me. That she bargained with him for my life, knowing Snow wants her dead too much. That he thinks he can’t save her. So he’s letting her save me instead.
It would explain--too well--why he wouldn’t tell me what’s going on, even though he knows I could have kept the secret.
He doesn't see a way to overcome the Capitol. Not directly, not through Katniss. So he's playing for second best. He's playing for me.
Even the possibility of this makes me want to panic.
“You have to be more careful with Katniss,” I say to Johanna, letting some bite slip into my voice. “If she’s under too much strain, she could lose the baby. If there’s a dangerous job, I should be doing it, not her.”
Johanna’s busy tossing her axes into the air, one after the other, and catching them behind her back. She’s only half paying attention.
“You got zapped to death twenty-four hours ago, and now you turn white as a sheet every time you insist on carrying Volts. If you don’t sit down and rest once in a while, you’re going to give yourself another heart attack. Then she’ll really be strained.”
“Johanna is right,” says Beetee from his seat in the shade. “We all need to be in our best shape. You can’t recover if you keep pushing yourself.”
“There’s only one victor,” I point out, because they shouldn't want me to recover.
“Yeah,” says Johanna, dripping with condescension. “And the victor usually wins because they have strong allies. Are you planning on turning yourself into dead weight, or are you planning on resting up so you can get your wife out of here? We all know that’s why you volunteered, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” I say. “But by that logic, you should let me wear myself out. If it’ll weaken Katniss, then maybe losing me will make it a fair fight for you when the time comes.”
Johanna flashes an all-teeth smile at me. Like she thinks it's hilarious, that I’d see her and Katniss as evenly matched. Joke’s on her. She hasn’t seen what Katniss does to my dad’s squirrels.
“Sit down, make us a new map, and stop trying to f*ck with my allies, Loverboy," she says.
Trying to double-speak with Johanna is almost as impossible as it can be with Katniss. So I do as she says, grabbing one of the right leaves to redo the map and settling next to Beetee. It's so hard to think when it’s so hot, when I’m this tired.
Then, sharply from the woods, there’s a scream. A familiar one. Katniss cries out.
“Prim!”
I fly to my feet. There’s the scream again, awful, agonized, distilled pain. My heart feels like it’s stopped a second time. No. Prim can’t be here. How is Prim here? Why does she sound like she’s being ripped limb from limb?
Crashing footsteps in the forest, as Katniss goes running for her sister. I start to run too, heedless of Johanna’s warning shout at my back, but before I even reach the trees, I collide with an unforgiving wall.
I reel backward into the sand, come up spitting grains of it. I can’t see what I ran into. The forest looks fine. I fling out a hand, cracking my knuckles against—well, I don’t know. Glass, or something. They’ve walled off the jungle, the trees, and now we can’t hear the screams anymore. Can’t hear where Katniss or Finnick have gone.
Johanna joins me. Runs her hand over the wall quickly—up, down, back, forth—then puts her shoulder into it, then her axe. Nothing.
Then Katniss and Finnick are there, hurtling soundlessly toward us, eyes so wide you can see the whites all around. Johanna and I shout at them to slow down, raising our hands, trying to catch their attention, but they can’t hear. They take the impact hard. Katniss sprawls in the ferns, but Finnick hits face first. He spins away with both hands over his nose, which gushes blood.
“It’s okay,” I shout at Katniss, drawing my knife. “It’s okay. Just wait a second. We’ll get it open, just wait.”
She beats a fist on the wall, darting a few steps left, then right. I drop to my knee and try wedging the knife under the bottom edge. Except, there isn’t really one. The blade just sinks down into the sand, screeching against the barrier.
“Dammit,” I grit out. I look over Katniss’s shoulder for Prim, but don’t see her. Katniss would never have left her sister. What does that mean? I rise, press my hand to the glass, and shout at her, “Where’s Prim? What happened? Where is she?”
She just puts her hand up against mine. Her fingers are so slim. They’re a full knuckle shorter than mine. She has that lightning-struck look that she did at our first Reaping. That depthless terror in her eyes from the moment after the force field.
“It’s okay,” I say, automatically. “It’s okay, it’s okay, Katniss, I’m here. It’s okay.”
“Oh, sh*t,” says Johanna, pointing into the lowest branches. And I finally see the jabberjays.
There are maybe half a dozen, more arriving with every breath. Their plumage glossy black as a Peacekeeper’s rifle, their sharp crests like knives.
It’s when Katniss starts shooting them down that I piece it together. Prim’s scream. The birds. The birds that copy human voices. Dozens, and dozens more, and then hundreds, puffing large with their now-silent terrors.
It's not Prim. This is a new wedge, a new Gamemaker trick. It was the jabberjays who screamed with her voice. Prim was never here.
But Katniss is trapped in there with the sound of her sister’s terrible suffering, and she's splintering under the assault. She’s already out of arrows. Finnick has crouched low on the ground with his hands pressed against his ears, a terrible look in his eyes, so the birds must be screaming with more than just Prim’s voice. Different screams that he recognizes.
But there’s nothing, nothing, nothing we can do. Katniss isn’t even looking at me anymore, can’t see me repeating that it’s okay, I’m here, it’s going to be okay, even though it’s not okay—Prim was screaming. These birds heard Prim screaming.
My forest girl is curled up fetal beside Finnick now, her eyes squeezed shut and her arms crushed against her head.
“sh*t, sh*t, sh*t,” Johanna is now saying, in a relentless, muttering stream. She paces short tracks just behind me, swinging the axes with dangerous distraction.
“Are we sure it’s only the jabberjays?” Beetee asks, with insulting calm.
“Obviously not,” Johanna snaps. “We can’t hear what they were screaming at us.”
Beetee joins us at the wall, running his hands over it in a slower, more methodical inspection. I stay crouched low on the ground, as close as I can to Katniss. She has begun rocking back and forth in the ferns the way she used to sometimes on the train during the Victory Tour. When the nightmares were so terrible I couldn’t easily shake her loose from them.
I slam a fist into the sand with frustration. I can’t get to her. I can’t get to her.
“It’s quite impenetrable. Psychological torture is an effective weapon,” Beetee concludes, unnecessarily. “But that may be good news for our allies. When the hour is up, I imagine this wall will disappear. If there are no other threats within, they should be physically unharmed.”
“Why the f*ck is that going to matter? They’ll just have spent an hour listening to their loved ones being tortured to death,” Johanna snaps at him. “Jabberjays copy.”
“Human voices, yes,” he agrees. “But not all human voices come directly from people. There are many ways to synthetically engineer the human voice. There’s no need to record a real person. Wiress is—was—well—always quite the prodigy with such things.”
Finally, Beetee falters.
The afternoon goes deafeningly quiet. The ocean, the wind in the trees, the shush of Johanna’s pacing in the sand, all out of proportion to the silent terror playing out right in front of us.
Over long, agonizing minutes, Beetee’s words sink in. And I can see he is right. Jabberjays sometimes copied radio transmissions during the uprisings. It would be much easier to create a recording that sounded like Prim’s scream than to actually torture her—and much safer, too, for Snow. No one in the Districts would be surprised if they really hurt Katniss’s sister. But it wouldn’t suit the televised narrative. The audience is already confused by our camaraderie in the interviews, by watching their victors die. President Snow walks a fine line. He daren't be too barbaric.
But I imagine if it were me on the other side of the barrier. If it weren’t just Prim screaming, but Delly. Tack, who I can’t imagine making such a sound, or Rhy—who gave us grappling lessons, who wanted just a few minutes with me after the Reaping, who has never been brave enough to stand up to Mother. If it were Rhy’s voice broken and awful and pleading, me trapped in there without Beetee, thinking that my brother was suffering, that his refusal to volunteer had not spared him, and that there was nothing, nothing I could do to make the screaming stop.
Or, if it were Katniss’s voice echoing through the trees, and I couldn’t find her. If I heard her voice like that, and I didn’t know where she was.
I begin shaking too.
The hour wears on. Finally, the birds begin to disperse. The wall doesn’t retract, or anything, but it’s obvious when it goes. Sound suddenly goes three-dimensional again. The jungle’s scream-free murmuring reaches out for us from the shade. I gather Katniss to me at once, pick her up off the ground, bring her out into the hot sun.
She doesn’t move for a long while. I hold her to me and talk, saying anything. You’re okay, it’s over, it’s not real, it’s going to be okay. I don’t know if she can hear me, but I want her to feel the words rumbling in my chest, soothing.
Eventually she loosens a little. Then she’s shaking so hard her teeth chatter.
“It’s all right, Katniss.”
“You didn’t hear them,” she croaks.
“I heard Prim. Right in the beginning. But it wasn’t her. It was a jabberjay.”
“It was her. Somewhere. The jabberjay just recorded it.”
“No, that’s what they want you to think. The same way I wondered if Glimmer’s eyes were in that mutt last year.” I am finally grateful for Beetee, for his calm, for his knowledge. For reminding me that the Capitol can make reality look like anything, when it isn’t. “But those weren’t Glimmer’s eyes. And that wasn’t Prim’s voice. Or if it was, they took it from an interview or something and distorted the sound. Made it say whatever she was saying.”
“No. They were torturing her. She’s probably dead.”
Katniss is hollow. Her voice a husk. What happens to a lightning-struck tree? It shatters. It falls.
“Katniss. Prim isn’t dead. How could they kill Prim?” I speak with more urgency. She needs to understand. She needs something concrete. “We’re almost down to the final eight of us. And what happens then?”
“Seven more of us die.”
“No, back home. What happens when they reach the final eight tributes in the Games?” I take her chin, lift it until she meets my eyes. “What happens? At the final eight?”
“At the final eight?” She’s empty for a moment. Then, “They interview your family and friends back home.”
“That’s right. They interview your family and friends. And can they do that if they’ve killed them all?”
“No?” she says, after a moment, genuinely asking.
“No,” I say firmly. “That’s how we know Prim’s alive. She’ll be the first one they interview, won’t she?”
She wants to believe this, I can see she does. But this is not the best tale I’ve spun. I’m inventing it as the words leave my tongue, and there are holes in it. Yes, Prim has to be interviewed for the final eight. Unless, of course, they don’t do the interviews, because of the uprisings, because it’s not safe for the crews to travel and film. They’ve skipped them before. The games where the dam broke, and the field narrowed from eleven tributes to three all at once. They interviewed mentors that year. There wasn’t time to shoot and edit footage. The Games ended so fast. Since there's precedent, I think they could get away with it again.
But they wouldn’t hurt Prim. They wouldn’t. Not yet. Not unless they were absolutely sure it served them.
If I invoke Prim's interview, does that protect her? Does that mean they have to keep her well enough to put on television? Maybe. I hope so.
“First Prim,” I say firmly, “Then your mother. Your cousin, Gale. Madge.” She flinches at each name like a slap. But she has to remember. She has to remember who is out there waiting for her. Alive, safe. They have to be. I will speak it into being. “It was a trick, Katniss. A horrible one. But we’re the only ones who can be hurt by it. We’re the ones in the Games. Not them.”
She wavers. "You really believe that?"
“I really do,” I lie.
She twists in my arms. Finnick is near us, crouched on the sand like he was crouched in the ferns, staring at me. His green eyes are dull as sea glass. I can’t tell if he was listening, or if in his mind he’s still back there in the trees, trapped with the jabberjays.
"Do you believe it, Finnick?" she asks him.
“It could be true,” he says, finally. “I don’t know. Could they do that, Beetee? Take someone’s regular voice and make it…”
“Oh yes,” Beetee says at once. “It’s not even that difficult, Finnick. Our children learn a similar technique in school.”
“Of course Peeta’s right,” Johanna says flatly. She is crouched next to Finnick, not touching him, but with him all the same. "The whole country adores Katniss’s little sister. If they really killed her like this, they’d probably have an uprising on their hands. Don’t want that, do they?” Then she tips her head to the sky, and she’s shouting. “Whole country in rebellion? Wouldn’t want anything like that!”
This, finally, is what shocks Katniss out of it. It’s the sheer audacity. Saying something like that out loud. Maybe they haven’t killed anyone’s loved ones yet, but they could, if we gave them the slightest reason. That was the real point of the jabberjays. To remind us that the Games are not confined to the arena. They never have been.
Johanna grabs a couple of shells off the sand and rises. “I’m getting water.”
Katniss catches at her hand as she brushes past us. “Don’t go in there,” she rasps. “The birds—”
“They can’t hurt me,” says Johanna, brusque. “I’m not like the rest of you. There’s no one left I love.”
The others begin, slowly, shakily, to regroup. Beetee tinkers with his wire while Johanna collects water and Katniss’s scattered arrows. Katniss remains in my lap, still trembling, for a while. I make no move to rush her. Johanna’s words settle deep under my skin in the silence.
She said that so casually. That there’s no one left she loves.
It’s not true for me. I was able to think of plenty of voices the jabberjays might have had for me. But only one that made me want to fly apart. And she’s here. She’s right here with me, in the most terrible danger. I have to hold my breath very steady just thinking about it. How this whole arena is my own personal jabberjay cage.
Finnick goes down to the edge of the water by himself, splashing the mud and tear tracks off his face. He keeps his back to us like he did when he was trying not to lose it over Mags.
“Who did they use against Finnick?” I ask Katniss.
“Somebody named Annie.”
The name rings a bell. An image comes to mind of a wild-haired brunette shaking on the Reaping stage. Of Mags’ hand flying into the air, so steady and strong. The girl’s hysterical tears.
“Must be Annie Cresta.”
“Who?”
“Annie Cresta. She was the girl Mags volunteered for. She won about five years ago.”
Katniss’s eyebrows pull together just a little in that concentration frown. “I don’t remember those Games much. Was that the earthquake year?”
“Yeah. Annie’s the one who went mad when her district partner got beheaded. Ran off by herself and hid. But an earthquake broke a dam and most of the arena got flooded. She won because she was the best swimmer.”
“Did she get better after?” Katniss asks. “I mean, her mind?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember ever seeing her at the Games again. She didn’t look too stable during the reaping this year.”
Many of the victors were familiar from years they mentored. But District Four has won many times. They wouldn’t need to send all their victors every year. It’s hard to imagine Annie Cresta being up for the job.
There’s a cannon then, and a hovercraft shows up over the six-to-seven o’clock wedge. The claw descends five times, but only for one body. We see a few limbs go up separately, and then a thing that might once have been a torso. I retrieve the map I'd only just started when Prim screamed, and we make our updates. JJ in our current wedge, four o’clock, for the jabberjays. I write beast at six o’clock. We agree, with little discussion, that we will not go anywhere near that wedge. Now that we know where we are on the clock again—and have no real need to go back to the Cornucopia--it should be easy to avoid.
Finnick goes fishing as the sun disappears in a blaze. Katniss takes a swim, rebraids her hair, and rubs more of the black pine ointment into her skin. She looks ghastly for a little while, but keeps forgetting about the stuff and scratching at her face, so a lot of it has rubbed off by the time we gather for our meal. Up comes a full moon, casting blue light over the now-quiet arena, and then the anthem starts going.
There are so many names. So many familiar faces. So many allies. We watch Wiress, Mags, Ophelia, Blight all fade one by one from the sky. It feels so slippery-fast. Like there’s no time to acknowledge the significance of any one life.
And too many of them who died protecting me. For what? I want to shout it at the sky. For what, Haymitch? How is this protecting Katniss, when there are beasts and jabberjays and a dome pinning her down like a bee under a water glass?
“Who’s left?” asks Finnick. “Besides us five and District Two?”
“Chaff,” I say, because I suddenly, fiercely miss him. Surely, Haymitch meant for him to be with our group. I wonder where he is. If he’s all right.
A parachute interrupts then. It’s more bread, this time the bite-sized square scones from District Three.
“These are from your district, right, Beetee?” I ask, when I unwrap them.
“Yes, from District Three,” he says, unnecessarily. “How many are there?”
Finnick takes the package and counts twenty-four.
“An even two dozen, then?” says Beetee.
“Twenty-four on the nose,” Finnick confirms. “How should we divide them?”
There’s something weird about this exchange, like there was something weird about the District Four bread. Finnick and Beetee make an awful lot of eye contact for a conversation about scones. I think it’s the number that's important, not the type of bread. Twenty-four means what, though? Twenty-four tributes? There are only eight of us now.
"Let’s each have three, and whoever is still alive at breakfast can take a vote on the rest,” says Johanna, visibly annoyed by this conversation. I can't tell if that's because she understands it, or because she doesn't.
Katniss stifles a laugh, though, apparently oblivious, and Johanna’s spiky expression goes a little smug. Like she’s not used to having her gallows humor appreciated. So, maybe I misjudged those two, and they’re not about to rip out each other’s throats. Katniss does like a grouch. There's the way she is with Gale, after all. And Haymitch too. This is part of her charm, I suppose, part of the thing that makes her so valuable to the districts. Sometimes she fights for people more, the more they fight her.
We relocate our camp to the ten o’clock beach after the wave, reasoning that we should be safe there for twelve hours from whatever is in the jungle. A horrible insect rasping starts up in the neighboring wedge, but whatever it is stays in the trees, like the monkeys and jabberjays.
Katniss and I take first watch. Camp falls quiet quickly, though Finnick’s sleep is restless, and he’s murmuring for Annie Cresta. I think of Katniss's voice shaking when she asked whether Annie’s mind ever recovered. I wonder if she saw herself in the poor, mad girl from District Four. If she saw herself as a shell. Couldn’t picture a life for herself after this that was anything but scraps.
It’s a physical ache to imagine it. Hard and pressing in my chest, like my heartbeat when it came back after the force field.
We sit facing away from each other in the damp sand for a long while, my left shoulder and hip pressed to her right. She stares out over the water and I at the fathomless jungle. She’s leaning hard into my body, and not for warmth—it’s a humid night. The insects in the next wedge sing a rasping, swelling menace over us. She is not shaking anymore, but she feels just on the edge of it.
Suddenly, Katniss rests her head against my shoulder, almost burying her face in my ragged shirt. It’s automatic to raise my hand, stroke her hair, like I did in the cave last year so many times. Like I did on the train. She relaxes under my touch, seems to shore herself up at once, and I think—this girl, she’s not a shell. She’ll never be a shell. She has so much to fight for, and so much fight left in her. They’ll never be able to take it all.
“Katniss,” I say, softly, without looking at her. I lift my other hand, trace the edge of the locket chain against my neck. “It’s no use pretending we don’t know what the other one is trying to do.”
It's time. We have to talk about it. The Games are two-thirds done, and I don’t know how many more private moments we'll have left. I am not going to figure out Haymitch in time. It has to come down to Katniss and I, in the end. It has to come down to her hearing me. To her seeing me. All I ever wanted was for this girl to see me clearly.
“I don’t know what kind of deal you think you’ve made with Haymitch, but you should know he made me promises too. So I think we can assume he was lying to one of us.”
She raises her head to look at me. There is no surprise in her clear gray eyes. She’s thought this over, too. She looks curious, but unmoved. “Why are you saying this now?”
“Because I don’t want you forgetting how different our circ*mstances are,” I say. “If you die and I live, there’s no life for me at all back in District Twelve. You’re my whole life. I would never be happy again.”
“Peeta—”
I stop her objection with a finger to her lips. Her breath huffs warm against my skin. She seems a little frozen by it.
“It’s different for you,” I say, quietly. “I’m not saying it wouldn’t be hard. But there are other people who’d make your life worth living.”
Gale. Prim. Mrs. Everdeen. Madge. The Hawthornes. Even Haymitch. Even if the uprisings were quelled tomorrow, and the Games went on forever, and all she did was live, it would mean so much. And what would I have in comparison? Tack has Ash now, a whole new life, and he's safer that way. Delly will make her own way. Rhy and my parents will never be able to make room for me.
No, everyone I’ve relied on in the months since the Victory Tour has been someone I borrowed from Katniss. It's time I gave them back to her.
I tug the chain over my neck, tilt the locket in my palm so the mockingjay catches the blue moonlight. I press the latch, and Katniss’s breath hitches when she sees what I’ve hidden inside.
Two photos. Prim and Mrs. Everdeen on the left, laughing, so bright. It’s a photo from the end of the Victory Tour, the harvest festival, I think. You could never imagine those horrible screams coming from those faces. And on the other side, Gale. He’s smiling, too, which he never does. I have to admit that I see it, what Katniss sees, when he's smiling. It sands all his sharp edges away.
Beside me, Katniss has stopped breathing. She just stares and stares at the photos. Like she’ll never get her fill.
“No one really needs me." I say it so gently. I don't mean it to be self-pitying. I only say it at all because it’s true.
She knows it’s true. I can read it in her stillness. The world will keep going without me, but without her, so many things, so many people, will shatter. If only one of us can live—if Haymitch has the power to save either one of us—of course it has to be her. She has to let it be her. I’ll scream it at the sky, for the cameras, for Haymitch to hear, if I need to.
She looks at me then.
Oh, how she looks at me, her eyes liquid moonlight, shimmering. She looks at me with a force that tips the world off its axis.
Now it’s my breath that stops.
“I do,” she says. “I need you.”
Then she kisses me in a burning hot flare. With this defiance and this fury and this—this need—and I—
Oh, god—I didn’t see it coming.
I try to stop her. I catch her hand, but she tugs it loose and buries it in my hair. I try to say her name, but she kisses it off my lips, then slips her tongue hot against mine, urgent, pleading, and my breath falters as her whole body presses full and lithe against mine with something she has never--something that only in my dreams has she ever--
And I can’t keep fighting.
I can’t keep pretending that I want to.
Every inch of her touch paints worlds against my skin. She pushes away the arena, the audience, the Capitol, the rebellion, until there’s just us. Just her hands in my hair and her mouth crushing mine. With the breath we pass back and forth, she gives life to another world, a different ending.
Cheese buns on chipped plates and the sunset over the Meadow. The two of us watching it from rocking chairs on our shared porch. Laughter echoing up over the sun-gold grass from someone, somewhere just out of sight. The forest like an embrace around the bowl of the horizon, filling the breeze with the scent of leather and pine.
Her kiss—this kiss—is the home I’ve never had, the one I’ve been searching for my whole life. Acceptance, whole and unconditional. A claim as fierce as the sun burning low in a brilliant orange sky.
And I—god help me. I know.
This is real.
My hands have found the hem of her shirt. My forest girl is on top of me, pushing me down into the sand like she won’t stop until she’s proven her I need you with every inch of herself, and I mean to let her. I want her touch everywhere, on every part of me, saying it again and again until I believe it indelibly. Real. I need you. Real.
But then the arena lights up brilliant blue with the first stroke of the midnight lightning storm. Thunder cracks through us like a slap. Finnick startles upright with a cry, hands fisting in the sand, chest heaving. I take the opportunity to pull away, just an inch, just enough to breathe. The salt night rushes in like tears.
“I can’t sleep anymore,” Finnick gasps. “One of you should rest.”
Then he really registers us. Katniss straddling me in the sand, the hands I’ve fisted in her shirt. It dawns on me, a little belatedly, that we are still on TV.
“Or, both of you. I can watch alone.”
No. No, we need to stop this. I let go of Katniss, sit back up. She doesn’t move willingly. Her moonlight eyes try to swallow mine, try to make me forget my resolve.
This is real, Peeta, she seems to say. Only this is real.Katniss.
“It’s too dangerous,” I say to Finnick. “I’m not tired. You lie down, Katniss.”
I will never be tired again. My heart will never beat normally again. I catch her eyes, I nod at her that it’s all right, but I can’t quite look away. They are still full of worlds. She is trying to give them to me.
I go with her to the row of grass mats where Johanna and Beetee lie fast asleep, because Katniss has taken my hand and won’t let go of it. She turns to press her forehead into mine and just breathes there. I shut my eyes and breathe too. Feel her hands tight in the back of my shirt, her body pressed up close. Her heart going just as fast as mine. Her, mine.
I can’t believe this is real.
For how long? I want to ask. Since when? What changed? How? Why?
But I don't waste a word, a second, on anything so silly. Because it will be so short. I can't believe how short-lived this must be. It steals my breath, a gut punch.
I make myself step back, just enough to untangle the locket and drop it around her neck. It’s caked with sand from when I dropped it to touch her. I touch her again, this time lightly, just below her collarbone where her family rests against her heart. Her mother, her sister. Gale. I’m not even jealous of Gale anymore. I didn’t know I still was until this moment, when the feeling leaves me for good. It’s nothing but a comfort to know that I’ve loved Katniss, and she has loved me, and they will love each other too. That she will go on in love. There's room for all of it. She needs me no less.
I drop my hand then to her belly, to where the baby would be, if we had really made one. Because here is where all our unrealized worlds must be tucked away for good.
“You’re going to make a great mother, you know,” I say, for the cameras. Then I kiss her, for me. She captures my lips with mine, holds me there, and we linger. This one slow and soft and possessive. I need you. I need you. I need you.
You have me, I say without words. Even when this ends, you have me. In our private worlds, in the should-have-been. In a rocking chair beside you, at the edge of the Meadow, in a sunset glow. In laughter and in quiet and in safety there, where no one can touch us. I have you. And you have me. No matter what. Always.
