The Hunger Games Trilogy (73 page)

“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.

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…”

His voice is quiet, but mine rings through the room. “Let the Seventy-sixth Hunger Games begin!”

I laugh. Quickly. Before anyone has time to register what lies beneath the words I have just uttered. Before eyebrows are raised, objections are uttered, two and two are put together, and the solution is that I should be kept as far away from the Capitol as possible. Because an angry, independently thinking victor with a layer of psychological scar tissue too thick to penetrate is maybe the last person you want on your squad.

“I don't even know why you bothered to put Finnick and me through training, Plutarch,” I say.

“Yeah, we're already the two best-equipped soldiers you have,” Finnick adds cockily.

“Do not think that fact escapes me,” he says with an impatient wave. “Now back in line, Soldiers Odair and Everdeen. I have a presentation to finish.”

We retreat to our places, ignoring the questioning looks thrown our way. I adopt an attitude of extreme concentration as Plutarch continues, nodding my head here and there, shifting my position to get a better view, all the while telling myself to hang on until I can get to the woods and scream. Or curse. Or cry. Or maybe all three at once.

If this was a test, Finnick and I both pass it. When Plutarch finishes and the meeting's adjourned, I have a bad moment when I learn there's a special order for me. But it's merely that I skip the military haircut because they would like the Mockingjay to look as much like the girl in the arena as possible at the anticipated surrender. For the cameras, you know. I shrug to communicate that my hair length's a matter of complete indifference to me. They dismiss me without further comment.

Finnick and I gravitate toward each other in the hallway. “What will I tell Annie?” he says under his breath.

“Nothing,” I answer. “That's what my mother and sister will be hearing from me.” Bad enough that we know we're heading back into a fully equipped arena. No use dropping it on our loved ones.

“If she sees that holograph—” he begins.

“She won't. It's classified information. It must be,” I say. “Anyway, it's not like an actual Games. Any number of people will survive. We're just overreacting because—well, you know why. You still want to go, don't you?”

“Of course. I want to destroy Snow as much as you do,” he says.

“It won't be like the others,” I say firmly, trying to convince myself as well. Then the real beauty of the situation dawns on me. “This time Snow will be a player, too.”

Before we can continue, Haymitch appears. He wasn't at the meeting, isn't thinking of arenas but something else. “Johanna's back in the hospital.”

I assumed Johanna was fine, had passed her exam, but simply wasn't assigned to a sharpshooters' unit. She's wicked throwing an ax but about average with a gun. “Is she hurt? What happened?”

“It was while she was on the Block. They try to ferret out a soldier's potential weaknesses. So they flooded the street,” says Haymitch.

This doesn't help. Johanna can swim. At least, I seem to remember her swimming around some in the Quarter Quell. Not like Finnick, of course, but none of us are like Finnick. “So?”

“That's how they tortured her in the Capitol. Soaked her and then used electric shocks,” says Haymitch. “In the Block she had some kind of flashback. Panicked, didn't know where she was. She's back under sedation.” Finnick and I just stand there, as if we've lost the ability to respond. I think of the way Johanna never showers. How she forced herself into the rain like it was acid that day. I had attributed her misery to the morphling withdrawal.

“You two should go see her. You're as close to friends as she's got,” says Haymitch.

That makes the whole thing worse. I don't really know what's between Johanna and Finnick. But I hardly know her. No family. No friends. Not so much as a token from 7 to set beside her regulation clothes in her anonymous drawer. Nothing.

“I better go tell Plutarch. He won't be happy,” Haymitch continues. “He wants as many victors as possible for the cameras to follow in the Capitol. Thinks it makes for better television.”

“Are you and Beetee going?” I ask.

“As many young and attractive victors as possible,” Haymitch corrects himself. “So, no. We'll be here.”

Finnick goes directly down to see Johanna, but I linger outside a few minutes until Boggs comes out. He's my commander now, so I guess he's the one to ask for any special favors. When I tell him what I want to do, he writes me a pass so that I can go to the woods during Reflection, provided I stay within sight of the guards. I run to my compartment, thinking to use the parachute, but it's so full of ugly memories. Instead, I go across the hall and take one of the white cotton bandages I brought from 12. Square. Sturdy. Just the thing.

In the woods, I find a pine tree and strip handfuls of fragrant needles from the boughs. After making a neat pile in the middle of the bandage, I gather up the sides, give them a twist, and tie them tightly with a length of vine, making an apple-sized bundle.

At the hospital room door, I watch Johanna for a moment, realize that most of her ferocity is in her abrasive
attitude. Stripped of that, as she is now, there's only a slight young woman, her wide-set eyes fighting to stay awake against the power of the drugs. Terrified of what sleep will bring. I cross to her and hold out the bundle.

“What's that?” she says hoarsely. Damp edges of her hair form little spikes over her forehead.

“I made it for you. Something to put in your drawer.” I place it in her hands. “Smell it.”

She lifts the bundle to her nose and takes a tentative sniff. “Smells like home.” Tears flood her eyes.