Chapter One

There are no trees in Victor's Village

It's a tidy place. An ornate fence with an ornate gate, which opens on a perfectly square green lawn. Twelve houses - ornate but also tidy, solid blocks of houses built of gray stone - line three sides of the green, four to a side.

For the better part of twenty-five years, most of these houses have been empty and the Village has had a population of exactly one. Today, the population is tripling.

The Capitol let me choose which house to take. There's no particular difference among them, so I had few restrictions. Haymitch occupies one, Aster asked me not to take another. I settled on a corner house next door to Haymitch and furthest from the entry gates.

Katniss, it turns out, picked the house at the other end of the row, the house closest to the gates, so we're all occupying the same side of the square. Haymitch grumbled about it - how three people with an entire neighborhood to occupy would all choose to huddle together: he's used to his privacy.

Haymitch follows me up my porch - I am lightheaded with the fumes of alcohol wafting off of him - and I know he's watching me for unsteadiness: I'm still not entirely stable on stairs, and I'm carrying two big boxes. We get into the front room of the house, and I put the boxes down on the floor with a "woof."

"What's that racket?" Haymitch grumbles.

"My family is helping me move in," I say. But what we hear sounds mostly like a lot of people running around and an out-of-tune clatter of music.

We go through the kitchen to the living room. Sure enough, my four cousins occupy this room with their particular talent for seeming to be at least twice their actual number. The boys are playing tag around the fancy furniture. Ally - the one girl in the whole extended family - is sitting at a piano, plunking away at the keys with more gusto than accuracy.

"Hell, Peeta, a piano?" asks Haymitch, putting his hand through his hair.

"Rich people have pianos," says my mother, entering from a side room.

She claps her hands a few times and starts shouting out my cousins' names - from history, I know it will take a few rounds of this to get them all settled down - and I say, in an aside to Haymitch, "Don't worry, it won't ever be used."

He just narrows his eyes as the kids are rounded up and sat down in a neat row on the sofa. My mother stands over them, arms akimbo, and I watch her with a detachment that is as deliberate as it is earned. She's better with them than she was with us. When I was younger, I struggled to understand this. I knew, vaguely, that it had to do with the fact that they were motherless and their father a raging drunk. But I have come to see the various complexities that were hidden to me when I was a child. Other things come in to play - her resentment toward my father, for one; her family history of violence for another. Whereas the punishment she doled out to us was either ignored or even justified, her brother's abuse of his children elicits sympathy in her for his kids. She sees her own miserable childhood in theirs.

Twisted. But trauma does funny things to your head. My own I recognize as a distorting glass. Everything feels different; everything looks different (I look different, hobbled and thinner). My emotions have undergone some kind of inverse operation – all those unpleasant ones, sadness and anger, that were quite rare visitors before, now live in the foreground. They wake with me in the morning, hard on the heels of the nightmares. They fill the empty spaces of the midmorning, rise with the sun and smolder with the dusk. My only recourse is to encourage the numbness – I have no other word for it – to creep over the darker emotions, to smother them in a fruitless, but comforting, blank silence.

Right after I came home from the Games, haunted by the paralyzing nightmares that seem to be my main souvenir from them, I spent forty-eight straight hours awake, with the only thing in my brain the image of a fire shining through a dark tangle of trees. I would give anything to reverse what really happened, so I just hung my mind there - that last moment before I witnessed, close-up, the murder of a girl – and just hit pause. Finally, I had to sleep - I had to sleep - and the nightmares came, inevitably replaying the horror.

And this is my life now: insomnia, insomnia, nightmares. Avoiding people, schedules, commitments, and, most of all, sleep - for as long as possible, in hopes that my eventual sleep will be too sound to contain these dreams. Not that it helps - the nightmares, like mutts, always eventually catch up to me: Dead girls, their faces swimming in the sky. Wolves encircling. The boy who tried to kill me – not Cato and his brute arms, but the smaller boy who attacked at the Bloodbath – and I raise my knife to him and I feel again that spike of anger and rage – that murderous feeling. But most often I dream of a living girl – of Katniss, her eyes flickering down as I relive the exact second I realized that everything new and real in my life was as insubstantial as the plywood and dust that mimics grandeur in the Capitol. And there is a feeling, again, a spike of – no, not anger, not rage, but … And then I will wake, sweating and whimpering, to find myself alone in a dark cave - and she is missing, and I'm terrified, and there is blood on my hands. And I regret every selfish thing I have ever thought about the girl.

And then I wake for real and all my limbs are frozen in place. For a few terrible minutes I have to wait in mute anticipation for the pain that accompanies waking - the prickling in the blood as feeling comes back to me - my skin sizzling back to wakefulness - my arms and fingers, my legs and toes - even the phantom limb, the half leg I've been missing since the Games.

"Peeta … Peeta …."

I blink as Haymitch snaps his fingers in front of my face. This is also true. Exhaustion means that life is lead in a semi-permanent fog. It's a good thing that, as a Victor, there is no need for me to actually do anything. I don't have to work. I don't have to go to school. There will be some obligations for the Capitol - I'll think about that later, I can't do it now - but otherwise, I'm just supposed to sit here, alone in my house in Victor's Village, a living embodiment of the glory of the Games and the primacy of the Capitol.

"What?" I ask him.

"I need to show you something," he says.

He all but drags me back into the kitchen and shows me the telephone and a directory. Hardly anyone in District 12 even has a hone, so most of the numbers in the directory belong to people in the Capitol. He mumbles something about limiting my phone calls to certain people and to so many times a month.

"Also," says Haymitch, "now that she can phone you, Effie will be checking in on your talent development - and I think we can assume her calls will be regular and punctual."

"Sure."

"Look," he says, between gritted teeth, glancing back toward the living room, where my cousins' raucous noise is starting to rev up again. "Don't let her dictate what you do with your life and your winnings. She didn't have shit all to do with it."

I think of a rainy afternoon and my mother's exasperated cries - I can almost see myself hesitating in the kitchen - standing halfway between the chilly air of the open door and the boiling heat of the ovens - on the knife edge of the decision: my mother's anger or a girl's life. "I don't know about that," I tell him. "But don't worry about it." I mean, what on earth am I supposed to spend the money on, anyway? There isn't a whole lot in District 12 to actually buy.

I walk with him back outside and we stand on the porch for a moment. I glance north and I can see three houses down, toward Katniss'. It's dark - she hasn't moved in, yet. But that should be later today.

Then - because I don't want to get caught lingering on her house, I pivot on my good foot to get a look at all of Victor's Village: my new home. Twelve houses. Set aside for victors of the Hunger Games. I was one of two last summer - normally, there is only one. And the victor usually comes from any of the other eleven districts. In all of the 74-year history of the Games, Katniss and I are only the third and fourth to have come from District 12. Twelve victor's houses seems overly-ambitious. Some Districts - 1 and 2 for instance - might need that many, I guess.

"Haymitch," I ask, abruptly, "how many living Victors are there, actually?"

"I don't know - fifty, sixty?"

"Don't you know?"

"What do you think - we have secret meetings? Support groups? I don't know."

Ally has started playing the piano again as I go back into the house. My mother is lingering over the boxes I brought in.

"Leave it," I tell her, a little more sharply than I intended.

She shrugs. "You sure you can get these upstairs?"

I self-consciously rub my left knee, feeling the bump where my natural leg meets the prosthetic attachment. "I thought I would use the spare room downstairs to sleep in. No reason not to, really."

She shakes her head. "Don't be ridiculous. I put all the - paints and whatever in there. The proper bedroom is the master bedroom upstairs."

I bite the inside of my mouth to keep from arguing with her. Whatever. "OK. Anyway, I can unpack later. You've … done enough. And it's only two boxes."

"You're going to have to have a housewarming, you know."

Yuck. Housewarmings – hearth-warmings - are normally associated with weddings. When you are assigned a house, it is because you are getting married and moving out of your childhood home. A happier occasion. "Hmm," I say.

She shakes her head. "Dana was hinting around - that - you could help out with …."

Now, anger spikes. As it always eventually does. I can taste it – the flavor is becoming very familiar. "Uncle Dana isn't getting anything from me. The kids - the kids I'll take care of, but he doesn't get shit." I stare at her. She suddenly looks a lot older to me - a lot smaller, too, and frailer. I feel a rush of a really dark, guilty joy that I am leaving her house, her presence ... her. "In fact, you can tell him from me - I have nothing better to do - I might just go to school every once in a while and check in on the teachers who have always asked me about their bruises … if he doesn't cut his shit out, I'll do better than give him the beating he deserves. I'll go straight to the Peacekeepers. Straight to the Capitol. Why are you pleading his case, anyway?"

Her face is tight and pink after this outburst, and I can see - I can feel - her resentment of me. "You're not doing much. I hear the Everdeens are moving in to Katniss' nice new house."

My shrug feels cruel – and oh-so-very satisfying. "I think they all actually like each other."

"You always were ungrateful."

I laugh at that. Then I frown. "Can you get Ally to play something else – anything else?"

"What - not in the mood for the valley song?" she asks, with an edge in her voice.

"If it was recognizable - maybe." I suck in my breath; I'm suddenly exhausted, and with exhaustion looms the horror of sleep. I have to refocus my energy on avoiding that. "Look - I do - I really do need to be alone right now."

When night falls, I struggle for a while with the coal stove that warms the house, then - hot and sweaty - I go outside to cool off on the porch. The darkness here is so eerie. Where I grew up - above the bakery in the dead center of town - there was nearly always light and activity. Here, there is a soft glow to one side - the direction of Haymitch and Katniss' houses - but otherwise, we are wrapped in the night. I'm at the rear of Victor's Village, and the village itself is on the south border of District 12 - the fence is no more than a mile away - and there is nothing in that direction. Not a soul.

And there are no trees. No place to hide. No place for the creatures to hide. The glow of the fire in the night, as I walk toward it - the beacon of the innocent. The gnarled branches framing a murder -.

I start at the sound of a closing door and look around to see Haymitch come out onto his porch and nod at me. He walks over and climbs up to me, making himself at home on the porch swing my mother made sure to order for me. He carries his flask - he would hardly look whole without it - and takes a swig before saying a word.

"Quiet now - thank god," he says. "Drink?"

I give a mirthless laugh. "No, thanks."

He sighs. "Nothing like a passed-out sleep and large chunks of memory lost to booze - to help deal with … things."

Well. This is a temptation, no lie. But I shake my head. "Haymitch - no offense. Currently, it's rather high up on my list to avoid turning into you."

His turn to laugh. "I remember that feeling," he says.

I look at him and try to discern his expression in the darkness. So much - there is so much still mysterious about this man who helped to save my life in the Games. Not just mine - but Katniss', as well. I don't know if he predicted just how successful his strategy would be - I still don't know for certain who he actually chose to win, Katniss or me. I provided the groundwork - a decision to lay down my own chance at winning for the possibility of ensuring hers. But his was a more subtle plan, teasing a love story out of our alliance. So - when she and I met again in the arena of the Games, all we had to do was pretend to fall in love, right there, right in front of everyone's eyes - and suddenly, for Panem, one Victor was not enough. So - I lived.

There were complications. Multiple games were being played at once, and when the Gamemakers rescinded the offer to allow for two victors - at the very end of the Game - Katniss had to outsmart them, one last time. She would not let them have one - it was both of us or neither. A gamble - so big of a gamble because I would have absolutely let her take the victory. But she won that round.

The other complication - minor in the big picture, but hard for me to get over: I really did fall in love with her. I was more than a little in love with her to start out with. And I truly did believe she had fallen for me. So, at the moment that I grabbed at it - really reached out to take happiness with both hands - I realized that I had been fooling myself, and she had been fooling me. It's been surprisingly difficult to get over that - of all the things to get over. It's been about a month, now, since we came home from the Capitol, holding hands for the crowds as they feted us with an enormous party. I walked her home after - and that was the very last of our interaction. Since then, it's just been sleep and nightmares I've been wrestling with, anyway. Would it be better to have her with me through this? Maybe it wouldn't make a difference.

But I doubt that.

And here's Haymitch. Who has been completely alone for as long as I've known him. No family. No friends. Nothing but booze. It's an ominous warning.

"You could go over," he says abruptly. "Welcome her to the neighborhood. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to do."

I rub my eyes. The very concept of my own sleepiness makes me panic. This is what I must do: forget Katniss, my mother, the Capitol, the false leg, the leafless village. I will not spend my first night in my new house asleep. I must not. That is the only thing that matters right now. "I'm not in a reasonable mood, Haymitch," I say. "Yet."

So, I go back into the house and walk around the lower floor for awhile. My boxes of clothes still sit in the front room. The coal fire has already sputtered out. I finally - sometime very late that night - find myself in the spare room - or the "study" as my mother insisted on calling it. I will not be working nor going back to school, but I do have to do something for the Capitol to prove that I am still a functioning member of society. Talent development, they call it. That decision was easy for me. I want to learn how to paint.

My mother set up the easel and one of the canvases. Tubes of paints are on the floor, boxes of brushes. For now, I think, pulling out the supplies and laying them out in front of me - for now, it would be enough to swirl colors on the blank canvas, just to get the feel of it. With any luck, this will keep my head occupied and sleep at bay.

And it does.