Johanna unlatches my locket, studying the pictures of Gale, Prim, and my mother. She opens the silver parachute and pulls out the spile and slips it onto her pinkie. “Makes me thirsty just looking at it.” Then she finds the pearl Peeta gave me. “Is this—?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Made it through somehow.” I don’t want to talk about Peeta. One of the best things about training is, it keeps me from thinking of him.
“Haymitch says he’s getting better,” she says.
“Maybe. But he’s changed,” I say.
“So have you. So have I. And Finnick and Haymitch and Beetee. Don’t get me started on Annie Cresta. The arena messed us all up pretty good, don’t you think? Or do you still feel like the girl who volunteered for your sister?” she asks me.
“No,” I answer.
“That’s the one thing I think my head doctor might be right about. There’s no going back. So we might as well get on with things.” She neatly returns my keepsakes to the drawer and climbs into the bed across from me just as the lights go out. “You’re not afraid I’ll kill you tonight?”
“Like I couldn’t take you,” I answer. Then we laugh, since both our bodies are so wrecked, it will be a miracle if we can get up the next day. But we do. Each morning, we do. And by the end of the week, my ribs feel almost like new, and Johanna can assemble her rifle without help.
Soldier York gives the pair of us an approving nod as we knock off for the day. “Fine job, Soldiers.”
When we move out of hearing, Johanna mutters, “I think winning the Games was easier.” But the look on her face says she’s pleased.
In fact, we’re almost in good spirits when we go to the dining hall, where Gale’s waiting to eat with me. Receiving a giant serving of beef stew doesn’t hurt my mood either. “First shipments of food arrived this morning,” Greasy Sae tells me. “That’s real beef, from District Ten. Not any of your wild dog.”
“Don’t remember you turning it down,” Gale tosses back.
We join a group that includes Delly, Annie, and Finnick. It’s something to see Finnick’s transformation since his marriage. His earlier incarnations—the decadent Capitol heartthrob I met before the Quell, the enigmatic ally in the arena, the broken young man who tried to help me hold it together—these have been replaced by someone who radiates life. Finnick’s real charms of self-effacing humor and an easygoing nature are on display for the first time. He never lets go of Annie’s hand. Not when they walk, not when they eat. I doubt he ever plans to. She’s lost in some daze of happiness. There are still moments when you can tell something slips in her brain and another world blinds her to us. But a few words from Finnick call her back.
Delly, who I’ve known since I was little but never gave much thought to, has grown in my estimation. She was told what Peeta said to me that night after the wedding, but she’s not a gossip. Haymitch says she’s the best defender I have when Peeta goes off on some kind of tear about me. Always taking my side, blaming his negative perceptions on the Capitol’s torture. She has more influence on him than any of the others do, because he really does know her. Anyway, even if she’s sugarcoating my good points, I appreciate it. Frankly, I could use a little sugarcoating.
I’m starving and the stew is so delicious—beef, potatoes, turnips, and onions in a thick gravy—that I have to force myself to slow down. All around the dining hall, you can feel the rejuvenating effect that a good meal can bring on. The way it can make people kinder, funnier, more optimistic, and remind them it’s not a mistake to go on living. It’s better than any medicine. So I try to make it last and join in the conversation. Sop up the gravy on my bread and nibble on it as I listen to Finnick telling some ridiculous story about a sea turtle swimming off with his hat. Laugh before I realize he’s standing there. Directly across the table, behind the empty seat next to Johanna. Watching me. I choke momentarily as the gravy bread sticks in my throat.
“Peeta!” says Delly. “It’s so nice to see you out…and about.”
Two large guards stand behind him. He holds his tray awkwardly, balanced on his fingertips since his wrists are shackled with a short chain between them.
“What’s with the fancy bracelets?” asks Johanna.
“I’m not quite trustworthy yet,” says Peeta. “I can’t even sit here without your permission.” He indicates the guards with his head.
“Sure he can sit here. We’re old friends,” says Johanna, patting the space beside her. The guards nod and Peeta takes a seat. “Peeta and I had adjoining cells in the Capitol. We’re very familiar with each other’s screams.”
Annie, who’s on Johanna’s other side, does that thing where she covers her ears and exits reality. Finnick shoots Johanna an angry look as his arm encircles Annie.
“What? My head doctor says I’m not supposed to censor my thoughts. It’s part of my therapy,” replies Johanna.
The life has gone out of our little party. Finnick murmurs things to Annie until she slowly removes her hands. Then there’s a long silence while people pretend to eat.
“Annie,” says Delly brightly, “did you know it was Peeta who decorated your wedding cake? Back home, his family ran the bakery and he did all the icing.”
Annie cautiously looks across Johanna. “Thank you, Peeta. It was beautiful.”
“My pleasure, Annie,” says Peeta, and I hear that old note of gentleness in his voice that I thought was gone forever. Not that it’s directed at me. But still.
“If we’re going to fit in that walk, we better go,” Finnick tells her. He arranges both of their trays so he can carry them in one hand while holding tightly to her with the other. “Good seeing you, Peeta.”
“You be nice to her, Finnick. Or I might try and take her away from you.” It could be a joke, if the tone wasn’t so cold. Everything it conveys is wrong. The open distrust of Finnick, the implication that Peeta has his eye on Annie, that Annie could desert Finnick, that I do not even exist.
“Oh, Peeta,” says Finnick lightly. “Don’t make me sorry I restarted your heart.” He leads Annie away after giving me a concerned glance.
When they’re gone, Delly says in a reproachful voice, “He did save your life, Peeta. More than once.”
“For her.” He gives me a brief nod. “For the rebellion. Not for me. I don’t owe him anything.”
I shouldn’t rise to the bait, but I do. “Maybe not. But Mags is dead and you’re still here. That should count for something.”
“Yeah, a lot of things should count for something that don’t seem to, Katniss. I’ve got some memories I can’t make sense of, and I don’t think the Capitol touched them. A lot of nights on the train, for instance,” he says.
Again the implications. That more happened on the train than did. That what did happen—those nights I only kept my sanity because his arms were around me—no longer matters. Everything a lie, everything a way of misusing him.
Peeta makes a little gesture with his spoon, connecting Gale and me. “So, are you two officially a couple now, or are they still dragging out the star-crossed lover thing?”
“Still dragging,” says Johanna.
Spasms cause Peeta’s hands to tighten into fists, then splay out in a bizarre fashion. Is it all he can do to keep them from my neck? I can feel the tension in Gale’s muscles next to me, fear an altercation. But Gale simply says, “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself.”
“What’s that?” asks Peeta.
“You,” Gale answers.
“You’ll have to be a little more specific,” says Peeta. “What about me?”
“That they’ve replaced you with the evil-mutt version of yourself,” says Johanna.
Gale finishes his milk. “You done?” he asks me. I rise and we cross to drop off our trays. At the door, an old man stops me because I’m still clutching the rest of my gravy bread in my hand. Something in my expression, or maybe the fact that I’ve made no attempt to conceal it, makes him go easy on me. He lets me stuff the bread
in my mouth and move on. Gale and I are almost to my compartment when he speaks again. “I didn’t expect that.”
“I told you he hated me,” I say.
“It’s the way he hates you. It’s so…familiar. I used to feel like that,” he admits. “When I’d watch you kissing him on the screen. Only I knew I wasn’t being entirely fair. He can’t see that.”
We reach my door. “Maybe he just sees me as I really am. I have to get some sleep.”
Gale catches my arm before I can disappear. “So that’s what you’re thinking now?” I shrug. “Katniss, as your oldest friend, believe me when I say he’s not seeing you as you really are.” He kisses my cheek and goes.
I sit on my bed, trying to stuff information from my Military Tactics books into my head while memories of my nights with Peeta on the train distract me. After about twenty minutes, Johanna comes in and throws herself across the foot of my bed. “You missed the best part. Delly lost her temper at Peeta over how he treated you. She got very squeaky. It was like someone stabbing a mouse with a fork repeatedly. The whole dining hall was riveted.”
“What’d Peeta do?” I ask.
“He started arguing with himself like he was two people. The guards had to take him away. On the good side, no one seemed to notice I finished his stew.” Johanna rubs her hand over her protruding belly. I look at the layer of grime under her fingernails. Wonder if the people in 7 ever bathe.
We spend a couple of hours quizzing each other on military terms. I visit my mother and Prim for a while. When I’m back in my compartment, showered, staring into the darkness, I finally ask, “Johanna, could you really hear him screaming?”
“That was part of it,” she says. “Like the jabberjays in the arena. Only it was real. And it didn’t stop after an hour. Tick, tock.”
“Tick, tock,” I whisper back.
Roses. Wolf mutts. Tributes. Frosted dolphins. Friends. Mockingjays. Stylists. Me.
Everything screams in my dreams tonight.
18
I throw myself into training with a vengeance. Eat, live, and breathe the workouts, drills, weapons practice, lectures on tactics. A handful of us are moved into an additional class that gives me hope I may be a contender for the actual war. The soldiers simply call it the Block, but the tattoo on my arm lists it as S.S.C., short for Simulated Street Combat. Deep in 13, they’ve built an artificial Capitol city block. The instructor breaks us into squads of eight and we attempt to carry out missions—gaining a position, destroying a target, searching a home—as if we were really fighting our way through the Capitol. The thing’s rigged so that everything that can go wrong for you does. A false step triggers a land mine, a sniper appears on a rooftop, your gun jams, a crying child leads you into an ambush, your squadron leader—who’s just a voice on the program—gets hit by a mortar and you have to figure out what to do without orders. Part of you knows it’s fake and that they’re not going to kill you. If you set off a land mine, you hear the explosion and have to pretend to fall over dead. But in other ways, it feels pretty real in there—the enemy soldiers dressed in Peacekeepers’ uniforms, the confusion of a smoke bomb. They even gas us. Johanna and I are the only ones who get our masks on in time. The rest of our squad gets knocked out for ten minutes. And the supposedly harmless gas I took a few lungfuls of gives me a wicked headache for the rest of the day.
Cressida and her crew tape Johanna and me on the firing range. I know Gale and Finnick are being filmed as well. It’s part of a new propos series to show the rebels preparing for the Capitol invasion. On the whole, things are going pretty well.
Then Peeta starts showing up for our morning workouts. The manacles are off, but he’s still constantly accompanied by a pair of guards. After lunch, I see him across the field, drilling with a group of beginners. I don’t know what they’re thinking. If a spat with Delly can reduce him to arguing with himself, he’s got no business learning how to assemble a gun.
When I confront Plutarch, he assures me that it’s all for the camera. They’ve got footage of Annie getting married and Johanna hitting targets, but all of Panem is wondering about Peeta. They need to see he’s fighting for the rebels, not for Snow. And maybe if they could just get a couple of shots of the two of us, not kissing necessarily, just looking happy to be back together—
I walk away from the conversation right then. That is not going to happen.
In my rare moments of downtime, I anxiously watch the preparations for the invasions. See equipment and provisions readied, divisions assembled. You can tell when someone’s received orders because they’re given a very short haircut, the mark of a person going into battle. There is much talk of the opening offensive, which will be to secure the train tunnels that feed up into the Capitol.
Just a few days before the first troops are to move out, York unexpectedly tells Johanna and me she’s recommended us for the exam, and we’re to report immediately. There are four parts: an obstacle course that assesses your physical condition, a written tactics exam, a test of weapons proficiency, and a simulated combat situation in the Block. I don’t even have time to get nervous for the first three and do well, but there’s a backlog at the Block. Some kind of technical bug they’re working out. A group of us exchanges information. This much seems true. You go through alone. There’s no predicting what situation you’ll be thrown into. One boy says, under his breath, that he’s heard it’s designed to target each individual’s weaknesses.
My weaknesses? That’s a door I don’t even want to open. But I find a quiet spot and try to assess what they might be. The length of the list depresses me. Lack of physical brute force. A bare minimum of training. And somehow my stand-out status as the Mockingjay doesn’t seem to be an advantage in a situation where they’re trying to get us to blend into a pack. They could nail me to the wall on any number of things.
Johanna’s called three ahead of me, and I give her a nod of encouragement. I wish I had been at the top of the list because now I’m really overthinking the whole thing. By the time my name’s called, I don’t know what my strategy should be. Fortunately, once I’m in the Block, a certain amount of training does kick in. It’s an ambush situation. Peacekeepers appear almost instantly and I have to make my way to a rendezvous point to meet up with my scattered squad. I slowly navigate the street, taking out Peacekeepers as I go. Two on the rooftop to my left, another in the doorway up ahead. It’s challenging, but not as hard as I was expecting. There’s a nagging feeling that if it’s too simple, I must be missing the point. I’m within a couple of buildings from my goal when things begin to heat up. A half dozen Peacekeepers come charging around the corner. They will outgun me, but I notice something. A drum of gasoline lying carelessly in the gutter. This is it. My test. To perceive that blowing up the drum will be the only way to achieve my mission. Just as I step out to do it, my squadron leader, who’s been fairly useless up to this point, quietly orders me to hit the ground. Every instinct I have screams for me to ignore the voice, to pull the trigger, to blow the Peacekeepers sky-high. And suddenly, I realize what the military will think my biggest weakness is. From my first moment in the Games, when I ran for that orange backpack, to the firefight in 8, to my impulsive race across the square in 2. I cannot take orders.
I smack into the ground so hard and fast, I’ll be picking gravel out of my chin for a week. Someone else blows the gas tank. The Peacekeepers die. I make my rendezvous point. When I exit the Block on the far side, a soldier congratulates me, stamps my hand with squad number 451, and tells me to report to Command. Almost giddy with success, I run through the halls, skidding around corners, bounding down the steps because the elevator’s too slow. I bang into the room before the oddity of the situation dawns on me. I shouldn’t be in Command; I should be getting my hair buzzed. The people around the table aren’t freshly minted soldiers but the ones calling the shots.
Boggs smiles and shakes his head when he sees me. “Let’s see it.” Unsure now, I hold out my stamped hand. “
You’re with me. It’s a special unit of sharpshooters. Join your squad.” He nods over at a group lining the wall. Gale. Finnick. Five others I don’t know. My squad. I’m not only in, I get to work under Boggs. With my friends. I force myself to take calm, soldierly steps to join them, instead of jumping up and down.
We must be important, too, because we’re in Command, and it has nothing to do with a certain Mockingjay. Plutarch stands over a wide, flat panel in the center of the table. He’s explaining something about the nature of what we will encounter in the Capitol. I’m thinking this is a terrible presentation—because even on tiptoe I can’t see what’s on the panel—until he hits a button. A holographic image of a block of the Capitol projects into the air.
“This, for example, is the area surrounding one of the Peacekeepers’ barracks. Not unimportant, but not the most crucial of targets, and yet look.” Plutarch enters some sort of code on a keyboard, and lights begin to flash. They’re in an assortment of colors and blink at different speeds. “Each light is called a pod. It represents a different obstacle, the nature of which could be anything from a bomb to a band of mutts. Make no mistake, whatever it contains is designed to either trap or kill you. Some have been in place since the Dark Days, others developed over the years. To be honest, I created a fair number myself. This program, which one of our people absconded with when we left the Capitol, is our most recent information. They don’t know we have it. But even so, it’s likely that new pods have been activated in the last few months. This is what you will face.”
I’m unaware that my feet are moving to the table until I’m inches from the holograph. My hand reaches in and cups a rapidly blinking green light.
Someone joins me, his body tense. Finnick, of course. Because only a victor would see what I see so immediately. The arena. Laced with pods controlled by Gamemakers. Finnick’s fingers caress a steady red glow over a doorway. “Ladies and gentlemen…”
The Hunger Games Trilogy Page 78
