In the beginning, there was only pain. Electric blue ripped up his spine. Ultraviolet burned behind his eyelids. Infrared glared, blazing at his fingertips, on his toes, everywhere the man knew it would hurt most.

He remembered a time before the beginning, but the memories felt misted over. There was a smiling father, brothers, a girl with dark hair and eyes like a storm, but they were faded, old black and white photographs blurred and yellowed with age. This world, his new world, existed in color, a brilliant spectrum of experience, but underneath it, he felt the shadow. The shadow hurt too, but it was a dull, pale pain, painted in watercolors where his own was etched into his skin.

He could feel the shadow boy, sometimes, could taste his fear as his own, felt his own heart race as the man approached his dusty other.

Peeta did not know when he became aware of the other boy as something more than an extension of himself, nor could he tell exactly where one ended and the other began. Dreams soaked into his mind as he lay awake, and while he slept, Peeta felt his shadow only more clearly. The boy was scared, as he was, but the man gave him none of the reassurances to which Peeta had become accustomed. While he was told the hurting would stop someday, his shadow knew nothing of his future. Peeta tried to comfort the other boy, tried to tell him that everything would be all right someday soon, but while thoughts slipped into his mind, he found the membrane between them impenetrable from the other side.

June 2017

MISSING

Lavinia Riviera

DATE MISSING: 10/9/16

FROM: Hesperia, CA

DOB: 11/7/99

HISPANIC FEMALE

EYES: Brown

HEIGHT: 5'2

WEIGHT: 114

HAIR: Red

Katniss stared at the picture of the pretty redheaded teenager, committing the girls' features to memory. As far as she knew, nobody had ever found a missing kid based on seeing their face on a milk carton. She still checked the picture every time. Those kids had nothing; the world owed them every chance it could give.

Satisfied that she didn't know the girl, Katniss tucked the carton back into the mini fridge. "Did you know that we have an all-staff meeting at ten?" she asked her coworkers, already knowing what their answers would be. Beetee and Wiress hadn't bothered to check their daily schedules once in the four years she'd been working here.

"Do we have to go?" Beetee asked.

"Well, it is an all-staff meeting, and we are all part of the staff, so I think that'd be a pretty good bet." Really, if any of them got to be pissed about having to show up to one of Capitol Corp's stupid teambuilding exercises, it was her. She was leaving this afternoon to transfer to another facility and they were still making her go.

"Nine, you said?"

"Ten."

Beetee tugged on Wiress' sleeve. He was the only one who the woman allowed to touch her, and not just the only person in the office. Beetee was the only person allowed to touch Wiress, period. "Did you hear that, Wiress? Ten o'clock meeting."

"Ten o'clock." She didn't look away from her screen. Just like every morning, she had carefully mixed two-thirds of a cup of coffee with two Splenda packets and filled it to the top with creamer, taken one long sip that smeared purple lipstick all over the side of her mug, and set her drink down on the coaster next to her as she booted up her computer. If her daily routine wasn't interrupted, the drink would sit on its coaster, cold and forgotten, until she washed out her cup the following morning.

Sipping her own, thankfully still warm, cup of coffee, Katniss wondered how much more productive she could be if she were so easily sucked into the computer. Thanks to Beetee and Wiress, the small robotics unit of Capitol's Seattle facility could keep ahead of some of the biggest labs in the country. Most days, Katniss felt like she was doing less than her fair share of the lab's work, and some days, she thought her biggest purpose in the office might be making sure the two of them remembered to eat lunch and go home at the end of the day. Which, she supposed, were important functions, just not what she'd earned a computer science degree for.

Wiress surprised her by speaking. "You're leaving today."

"I am."

The conversation ended there. She wasn't sure what else she'd expected.

This wasn't her fault. She didn't make the reservation. The booking information appeared in her work inbox with instructions on what she would and would not need to bring for her 'extended business trip', she got on the plane it told her to, and now Katniss got to deal with the fallout from showing up four days early. Nobody had ever given her the dates she was supposed to be here. It had all been set up by the Montana office. Why was Adam, the world's least charismatic and most annoyed man, pissed at her? She hadn't wanted to sit around Billings International Airport for four hours waiting for him to show up any more than he'd wanted to spend those same four hours driving down to get her.

He hadn't even tried to talk to her when she got into the car. Maybe she shouldn't have gotten in. Yeah, his license plate matched the one the office had given her when she'd called them after finding nobody waiting for her, but this Adam guy they'd sent to pick her up was seriously weird. But a serial killer would at least be happy to see her, right?

She wished she hadn't changed into her heels. Capitol wasn't a particularly strict workplace, and Katniss had never seen evidence of an enforced dress code in any of the offices. There was no reason she'd had to change, and now, she couldn't run even if her life depended on it. On the bright side, the four-inch heels might make a good weapon. Checking that Adam wasn't watching her in the rearview mirror, she slipped off the shoe, testing its weight in one hand. Not as good as her pepper spray, but if she had to, Katniss could make it work.

She couldn't show her concern. "Have you been living out here for very long?"

He didn't take his eyes off the road. Didn't turn his head either. "Several years."

"Do you like it? It's a very pretty part of the country."

"Yes." Wasn't dying to divulge anything more than she asked, was he?

"I haven't spent much time out here. I drove through when I moved out to Seattle, but I didn't stop. Kind of feel like I missed out there. Think I might try to come out here and do some hiking sometime." This might mark the first time she had ever been the chatty one in a conversation. Never mind, she worked with Wiress, so that wasn't quite true, but at least her coworker just tuned out when she had decided to be done with a conversation. Maybe Katniss had just gotten used to it, but being left hanging felt a lot more natural than only having direct questions answered. "Do you hike much?"

"No."

She was tempted to see if she could Twenty Questions her way into some juicy information on the top-secret project she was working on, but something told her that would be even less appreciated than her attempts at small talk. "Should I let you focus on the road?"

"Yes."

"All right, then." She probably had thirty emails to answer anyway. Beetee and Wiress were terrible about replying, so everyone CC'd Katniss on every communication to her group. She didn't expect that to change just because she had been reassigned a few hundred miles away. And it wouldn't hurt to let Haymitch know she had met her ride. Katniss resisted the urge to curse as she dug through her carryon for her cellphone.

The second she found it – wedged up in between pages of her brand-new planner and bending the pages, of course – it was snatched out of her hands. "You can't have your phone at the facility."

"Sorry?" That definitely had not appeared on the list of things to avoid bringing.

"Snow's orders."

"Well, I haven't seen anything secret yet, so I don't see the harm in letting me have my phone until we get there."

"Snow's orders," the man repeated. Could he sound any more like a movie villain's henchman?

She wanted to give him a piece of her mind, but Katniss didn't want to upset her higher-ups before she even showed up.

"Fine," she huffed. If Snow wanted to pay her to sit around reading a novel, she supposed that was his prerogative. Her e-reader probably fell into the same category as her iPhone, so one-handed, she dug through the depths of her luggage for the romance she'd been lugging around for months.

Katniss' other hand still rested on her high heel, just in case.