The last thing she sees is Thresh's face, twisted in anger.
The last thing she hears is Cato begging her to stay with him.
The last thing she feels is, strangely, not the pain, but Cato holding her hand. His grip is strong and his palm is rough.
Blearily she thinks, I should have kissed him, just once.
They tell her what happens, afterwards.
They tell her how she had been left brain-dead and unconscious. How her heart had even stopped for a second, setting a cannon off. How Cato had rescued her and taken care of her. How she had been assumed dead. How the last Tributes had killed each other off and the young lovers from District Twelve had committed double suicide, so tragic, leaving Clove the victor.
At first she had been written off as a lost cause, a vegetable, but in the end it took the Capitol's very best brain surgeons to revive her. Nothing but the best for the victor of the 74th Hunger Games would do.
One thing is clear — she is not the victor they wanted.
A week later, she forces herself to watch the tapes, from the beginning.
Compared to the focus on District Twelve's star-crossed lovers, Clove seems almost an afterthought. They clearly intend to frame this as the tragic and doomed love of Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, how they killed themselves rather than be separated.
She watches unflinchingly as Thresh smashes the rock against her head but it's what Cato does afterwards that brings her to tears.
"Stay with me, please Clove, stay with me. We have to win this. Together." he repeats over and over again as he rocks her in his arms, his hand clutching her wrist, feeling for her pulse.
A cannon goes off in the distance.
A second later, her heart starts beating again.
Cato takes her back to their hideout. He cleans and dresses her wound. He spoon feeds her broth and chewed-up food, massaging her throat to get her to swallow. He watches over her in the night. He sits with her, talking to her about anything. Again and again he talks about what life will be like after they win, how the Capitol doctors will fix her up.
Clove had no idea Cato was capable of such tenderness. (The look in his eyes shows a desperation bordering on love.)
A few days later he receives a message from his mentor. The sponsors want him to ditch her, she's dead weight and holding him down. It says only 'she's gone.'
He throws it away.
"What about Clove?" the bread boy asks.
"She's dead, I heard the cannon."
"I didn't see her name in the sky."
"We must have missed it in the chaos, look, I saw her die. Thresh hit her in the head with a boulder. No one could survive that."
She refuses to look away as Cato dies, she owes him that much, at least. All the while she curses that girl on fire for leaving him to suffer. For the first time she feels something like triumph when she dies.
She is one of the least popular victors, a pale shadow of the girl on fire. They whisper that it's not right that a victor should win by pure luck alone. She holds her head high. It's better this way.
The 75th Hunger Games features an increased age range, so that children as young as nine and men and women as old as twenty-five are in danger. There is only one child younger than twelve picked and his father wastes no time volunteering for him.
There are whispers of a rebellion but they soon die out.