The director is standing with the camera man, last minute preparations. The lights are glaring, hot on my back and nearly blinding me. My eyelids are heavy, desperate to close in sleep - but I haven't been allowed to lie down for the last 48 hours, and sleep is a long time away.
A sharp piece of metal is fashioned to a point in the center of my shirts collar, covered in cloth and jutting upwards into the flesh just below my Adam's apple.
If my head starts to bob, if I begin to nod off in exhaustion, the point will pierce my skin. Barely missing a vein, it will nevertheless cut deep, adding to the pain from the cuts zigzagging across my ribcage.
President Snow sits at my left, his posture unerringly sharp and straight. He does not look at me or talk to me; he only doesn't acknowledge me in public, preferring the privacy and darkness of my cell to make his points.
The stylist darts forward, straightens Snow's collar, then backs away. The director nods at her and she scampers off. The director looks at Snow.
"Ready when you are, Mr. President."
Snow nods. A few seconds pass, the director yells 'action,' and the man next to me begins reading from the teleprompter. His voice is low, clear, almost pleasant. I suppress a shiver; he uses the same tone when interrogating me, when reassuring me that if I just yield information about the rebellion - information I don't have, I've yelled over and over - the pain will stop, and Katniss will be spared.
A shape moves out of the darkness behind the camera and stands at the edge of the soundstage where the Capitol and Snow are shooting propaganda to counterattack the Rebellion. It's a man, tall and muscular, his craggy face pulled into a manic grin while his beady eyes focus on me.
His name shivers through me, the voice echoing in my head eerily like Snow's. Antonius. The knife he has been using on my ribcage is in his belt, the blade glinting in the harsh stage lights. He has a syringe in his hand, and it too is reflecting the lights as it twirls and spins. He is playing with it, playing with me, his beady eyes boring into me.
I was told by the director to look up and away from the camera, poised and unmoving, as if I were above it all - the violence, the anarchy,t he Rebellion. Just as I was for Katniss, he ways, I am to be a symbol of steadiness and peace, of words rather than actions. Antonius must have overheard, because he is standing directly in my eyeline so that I can see every calculated movement.
I suppress another shudder. I cannot help my reaction to this man - for weeks now, the only faces I have seen are his and Snow's. He had suggested the tactic of keeping me awake, melding exhaustion, fear, and desperation into unending strings of minutes and hours. I had heard him torturing Johanna, too, her screams loud and clear in the cell next to mine.
I looked at the syringe. I can't imagine what that is for; they haven't used it yet.
Another shudder. No, I cannot move, I cannot blink, I cannot do anything to mess this up. Because if I mess up, Katniss bears the brunt of Snow's wrath. If I mess up, she's as good as dead. If I don't do exactly what they tell me - exactly being Snow's words - Katniss will die and everyone who made it out of District 12 will die too. If I move, if I stumble, if I falter, if I stutter, thousands of lives will be lost at my hand.
She's the reason I am enduring this. Because she didn't know, couldn't know; Katniss was never good at keeping secrets or performing under prolonged pressure. She wouldn't have left me here, knowing all along that there was a Rebellion and she would be rescued, but I would not.
Snow keeps trying to convince me otherwise; bright, never ending lights shining overhead as I am strapped to a table, a knife point nicking the space between my ribs as Snow insists, over and over, that Katniss knew and I must know something too.
I know that the moment the camera stops rolling that I will be back in hell, Antonius leading me down the corridor of cell blocks into mine, where my cot is on one side and the table with the straps and the buckles in the center, the spotlight. The lights will glare, the walls and floor a gleaming white so night that I do not know where one begins and the other ends. I can feel the edges of my memory of that room going hazy, bleeding into the rest of my brain so that all I remember is that room. Nothing else seems real, nothing else has existed outside of that room. The only people in the world are Snow, Antonius, and a phantom with Johanna's voice. I don't know if I exist. It doesn't seem possible - that much agony cannot be human.
Only one thought keeps me grounded, keeps me from diving into the deep end that a lack of sleep and constant excruciating pain keep beckoning me toward. It is the thought of Katniss Everdeen, her smile, her lips, her eyes lighting up with a smile. They can't take that away from me.
The point in my collar digs deep into my neck. Antonius has taken to pushing the plunger of the syringe, taunting me. Snow is still speaking, but his voice is now slow and measured, reciting the phrase I repeated every day as a child.
"Panem today, Panem tomorrow, Panem forever."
That's my cue. I turn my face slowly towards the camera, my eyes wide and blank.
A second to two passes, then the director yells 'cut' and everything is a frenzy. The stylist is rushing back in, a man turns off the brightest light, and President Snow is rising from his chair. He nods, and then Antonius beside me, gripping my elbow with a vice-like grip that will deepen the bruises patterned across my arms.
He flicks the syringe up with his free hand, catches it, then grins maliciously down at me.
"I am going to have fun with this."
There is no point in showing fear. It would amuse him, certainly, but as the shape pain in my throat tells me, it can't get worse.