Sterile. White. Cold. Boring. I do not remember anything from the last month and a half. The fact that all I hear is a measured beeping, liquid droplets and a mechanic buzzing automatically tells me that I'm not at the Capitol anymore. Quite honestly, I don't know where I am. And the only person I can think of is her. Her warm, silky smooth skin, her voice, so smooth and sweet, almost like honey. The looks of an angel, really. Katniss Everdeen, my fiance, as far as everyone knows. My best friend, as far as a select few know. Instead, I'm left with Haymitch Abernathy. The ever intoxicated, mangy, disheveled excuse of a man, responsible for keeping Katniss and me alive during the Hunger Games and the Quarter Quell, sits across the room from me. He holds no bottle of white liquor and, therefore, looks completely unnatural. I keep a close watch on him as I feebly sit up on my cot. I guess he can see the interrogation in my restless gaze because he asks the question before I can.
"You sure you are ready for that?" he asks.
Why do I feel like he means more than sitting up? He either thinks I am ready for what he is about to say or he just wants to get this over with.
"She is missing. No one has seen Katniss Everdeen since a week after we extracted you two from the Quell. No messages, no notes left. Nothing," he says in the most reposing voice he could muster. A scalding iron has been shoved down my throat, a rough noose tied to keep it in place. I convulse into a sweat and it is all I can do not to pass out. Haymitch crosses the room in a disciplined couple of strides and punctures my arm with a needle. All sound is blocked by some imaginary, invisible blockade as I slowly shrink to nothing.
Just like before, there's the too sterile, too bland surroundings when I awake again. Haymitch is gone, but I am still not alone. A boy, no more than a year or two older than me, leans against the wall, arms crossed, looking straight at me. I am bound to the bed, so any movement on my part is automatically restrained. I know who he is and, by the flustered look on his face, he knows me. He stalks across the room with an unsure pace.
Gale Hawthorne looks me in the face and says the words I never expected to hear from him. "I need your help."
"I know she is missing, but I do not know why. But if you had anything to do with it, then-"
"I did nothing," Gale interrupts my building hostility. "She found out what our plan was, to pull you all from the arena at the end of the Quarter Quell and bring you to Thirteen. When you were not here, but at the capitol, she was enraged. She scrambled from the command room and we let her go thinking she just needed some air. I went out to check on her five minutes later and she was gone. We must have searched devoutly for days before you arrived. When they landed that hovercraft, I bolted to the door, knowing that it would be her that walked out. When they pulled you out, instead, I wanted to strangle you. I wanted to feel the life slink out of you immediately just because you were not her. So many things crept through my head that day before I finally realized that I need your help, not your death. So here I am."
Five minutes with Gale and I already know everything that has happened since the Quarter Quell. My head pounds like I am constantly being beaten and I swear everything is fogging up around me. I sort things out and come to a few conclusions: One, District Thirteen does still strives, even after the Capitol's attempt to bomb it into oblivion, and I am there. Two, Katniss is missing. No one has any clue where she is but they have been searching. Three, I have to help Gale Hawthorne. He may be my only competition for Katniss, but if I do not help find her, we will have both lost her forever. A single tear fights on the edge of my eye to escape and when it finally does, it tickles as it slithers an arced path down the side of my face.
"Fine," I say to him. Gale relaxes a bit and removes the bindings securing my wrists, ankles and waist.
The Command center is dark and humming with electricity. Screens all around, much more than you would see in any district, cover a panoramic wall. Different scenes from all over the underground, stone catacombs of District Thirteen. A quick briefing from some lady called Coin, and I am off to the armory to see Beetee. An acquaintance from the Quarter Quell, Beetee has been assigned a job in weapons design. He gives me as many weapons as I can possible carry and within minutes we are in the sky hovering above Panem. Our main focus is getting her back. We search the woods, her beloved hunting ground. We check every small body of water, relieved when we do not find her lifeless and cold, floating body. We check every District, aside from Two as the are still on the side of the Capitol, and Twelve, as it is now nothing but the shadowy remains of what used to be our home. Bloodless, rotting corpses perfume the air like some cloud of mold creeping through what always smelled like my family's bakery. Then it hits me. Why it took me so long, I do not know. She is there. After we became victors of the seventy-fourth Hunger Games, Katniss would always go back to her old house, as opposed to our new mansions in Victor's Village, to escape any current troubles. We go directly from District Four to District Twelve, begin a descent, and wait for any sign of an attack. Moments later, Gale and I are on the grounds of our old home, searching in the feverishly hot, radiating sunlight that neither of us have seen in weeks. Gale goes down to the Hob, the former black market where illegally obtained food was traded, while I go to the Everdeen's home in Victors Village. Right next door to mine, the only residents of the Village were the only District Twelve Victors. Katniss, Haymitch and me. Everything is just how it was before we left for the area. Cold, smooth marble floors lead to a warmed plush carpet in the living room. A counter holds a crystal bowl of fruit, a rainbow of light reverberating in every direction from the crystal. One single, sinister rose lies on the counter, a sickly brown color growing on every petal as the flower dies. The house has an eerie, plagued feeling about it as if some cynical soul, not able to move on, passes through it in a ghastly manor. At once, I feel like I am being watched, no doubt by members of the Capitol. I timidly scamper from the house to where Katniss lived before. Nothing more than a heap of dispersing wood that has the appearance of exhaling as a cloud of dust seeps from every open nook visible. Then I see her. The waist length braid that she wore on the day of the reaping that sent us into the Hunger Games now hangs limply down her back. She always criticized how loud I am when I walk, so it does not surprise me when she turned around upon hearing my footfalls. We gaze at each other for a moment before either of us say anything, but already there is a sense of elation, of light happiness, within me. Adrenaline pulses through my body as I see the woman I love standing there in front of me. She opens her mouth as if to speak when all sound is engulfed by a boisterous humming. I risk a glance toward the sky and see a shining hovercraft advance so swift and steady. A sudden pain stabs me in the back and I fall to the ash blanketed ground, particles of ash, dirt and grime landing in my mouth and dissolving on my tongue as a snowflake would. I feel every muscle of my being tense and I know automatically. Temporary paralysis. Before the Poison latches itself to the muscles in my face, I steal a glance toward where Katniss stood. Gale has materialized out of the forest and pulls her in with him. I make out the one sound that will stick on the surface of my mind and shrink into non existence for the next few weeks. Her lovely, honey voice creating the last memory of District Twelve I will be able to cite. Then I slip into darkness as the foot of a Peacekeeper crushes my skull while an electric current flows through my body from some unknown source. Her words echo through my mind and create a pain not unlike being stabbed with a flame much too frequently. "Peeta, I love you," she said. "Yeah," I think in her direction. "I love you too." Then I fall beneath the surface of some dark, warm water. I know that something so comfortable can only be sinister. It is the Capitol, after all.