"Good thing you girls have me along," Ashe boasts, tossing another crate into the train like it weighs nothing.
"Shut up and load," Johanna snaps. At any other time in her life, she'd be hauling in her own share, proving she could keep up with the strongest men, but today she thinks if she stops leaning against the side of the train, she'll pass out.
She masks the dizziness by folding her arms as she leans back. A casual pose, a supervising pose.
He's only here, they're all only here, because of her, anyway. The men lying moaning on the ground, the men who'd refused to back down and yield the train they were raiding...well, they're only here because of her too.
Johanna has to hang on to her command or all is lost. She's only got half a dozen men and women answering to her right now, willing to fight off their own half-starved people for taking food that didn't belong to them, and willing to deliver it to the right hands.
If they turn on her...
"All right, that's enough!" Johanna shouts with all the strength that's left to her. "Board up!"
They need to get out of here before they get caught. Leaving behind a pile of crates, the team dismantling the barrier that stopped the train and the team reloading the freight all stop what they're doing and obediently enter the train.
Johanna pulls herself up into the engine. There's room for two, but only one seat behind the control panel. Through the door on the other side, Mickee is coming up into the car with her. She waits for Johanna to decide what to do.
Staring with fury at the arrangement, Johanna finally snaps an order at her. "Get one of the guys to bring a crate up here."
Mickee hops out again with a sprightliness that Johanna envies, and a minute later she's got something to sit on. "Ashe, make sure everyone's aboard. We pull out in sixty seconds."
"Yes, ma'am," and she doesn't care if that's mockery in his voice, she's got a job to do and she can't do it alone. If she could fight this war alone, she wouldn't be on this train.
"You're sure you know how to drive this thing?" she asks Mickee.
The other woman nods. "I used to take deliveries into Six. I can make the train go where you want it. I've even checked the fuel. I just don't know the way into Three, and I wouldn't want to lead us into enemy territory by mistake."
"I know the way," Johanna says. "Take your seat, then."
She's already on hers, clinging hard to the door handle. She needs to stay conscious long enough to guide them. "Kick me if I fall asleep and you're not sure at all. I'd rather be woken up for nothing than end up in the wrong place. Actually, scratch that. Just kick me if I fall asleep."
Mickee looks at her boss with concern. "Shouldn't we wait?"
Johanna knows better than to shake her throbbing head or she might throw up, but she argues vehemently, "We have to get this train to Four before they decide we've betrayed them. They haven't seen a delivery from us for months. If they have to come marching in demanding where the troops they sent us went and why we've been hijacking all their trains from the east and taking all the food and eating it ourselves-"
"Surely they'll understand about the plague?"
"No," Johanna insists, "we need to take the initiative. As a gesture of goodwill, if nothing else. And we need more troops, and I want them coming in on my terms. I wouldn't be doing any of this if I thought we could hold Seven ourselves. Now pull out."
Mickee obeys. "Well, I certainly don't want the Peacekeepers coming back."
All the long ride, Johanna grits her teeth and hangs on as she navigates. It's not bad enough she just crawled off what felt like her deathbed, sitting on a crate in a swaying train with no back support is fanning the flames of her back pain. But she's toughed her way through this injury for years, and today may be her most important contribution to the war.
"All right," Johanna says, when the terrain, which had flattened out, starts to get mountainous again ahead. "There's a tunnel coming up, in, I don't know, a couple hours. We'll stop there and rest. It's another eighteen hours to the border, and we don't have anyone to trade shifts with you. Besides, I'd rather travel at night as much as possible."
"Okay." Mickee hesitates. "If I don't know exactly where it is, we'll have to waste fuel crawling toward it. This thing doesn't stop and start on a leaf."
"Tough. I'll need you focused during the second leg."
When Mickee coaxes them into the tunnel, she thinks of another objection. "If we're stopped here, an oncoming train won't see us."
"They won't see us anyway if we're coming through at full speed," Johanna points out.
"Well, if we're both signaling...we should get enough warning to divert. Should I signal ahead the entire time we're at rest?"
Johanna ponders that one through her pounding head and wishes she were up to making decisions like this. Signaling will defeat the purpose of hiding here. But getting killed in a train crash will defeat the purpose of bringing a delivery into Three.
"If you receive a signal of an oncoming train, can you back us up quickly?"
Mickee makes a face. "Maybe?"
"We'll risk it, then. Make an announcement to the rest of the team that we've stopped and why, and wake me up at nightfall."
Johanna wraps her cloak around herself and curls up on the floor beside her crate.
She comes to without knowing where she is or who's shaking her, just gasps and shivers and tries to pull herself together.
"I didn't think you were going to wake up," Mickee says with relief, when Johanna finally lifts her head off the floor with a mental apology to her neck.
Johanna isn't sure she wanted to. It's freezing, everything hurts, and she's hungry, but she's not sure she could hold anything down.
"At least we survived the day. Is it dark yet?"
"It's darkening," Mickee informs her. "I wanted to get a glimpse of the terrain ahead before we leave. If you think we can risk it," she adds.
Johanna knows she's not thinking clearly. "Sure."
"And maybe you should draw me a map." Mickee sounds embarrassed but firm.
She doesn't back down even before Johanna's death glare.
"A map on what, exactly?" Johanna finally breaks, admitting that she's gotten worse again since they left. "You brought paper and pencils?"
"Or give me more detailed instructions."
"Hell, how do you give instructions with landmarks you only know because you recognize them? Could you give instructions in the woods?" Johanna sighs. "Stay as far west as possible, that should go without saying, but be careful of that one switch that'll start out west but take you over the mountain and back east. It's, fuck, is that the one with the lake? I think there's a lake in sight. Take the east one and it'll go through another tunnel and keep heading south.
"And once you get most of the way there—I don't know, six hours from the border—you'll want to hang east again, because there's a double track, and we use the east one for southbound trains and the west one for northbound trains. You should be able to avoid getting into a crash from that point on, unless there's a stopped train ahead."
After about an hour, Johanna has to shift off the crate, admitting that she can't sit up any longer. "You know the way," she mumbles. "Take it from here, girl."
Checkpoint ahead.
Mickee moves her lips in silent words that would have gotten her mouth washed out as a child. She's not quite to the point where she can say them out loud, but she's come a long way since she started modeling herself on the woman lying feverish and delirious beside her.
During the long boring stretches, she's risked reaching over and trying to shake and nudge Johanna awake, but she's unresponsive, and after a while Mickee stopped trying. This trip has obviously sent her into a relapse of the sickness that's been running rampant at Seven's main military encampment.
By coming on this journey, Mickee's putting a lot of faith into the vaccinations that came in from the east after the first wave of the plague, but Johanna's filled her with deeper fears of what happens if they don't restore the alliance with Seven. Peacekeepers, enemy troops, no more food deliveries, a repeat of the Dark Days...she'll drive the train.
But now she has to do more than drive the train. With Johanna out, she has to make decisions.
Navigating, okay, she did it with her heart pounding, but each choice came without immediate repercussions, so she subsided back into a dull dread for the long ride.
Now, though, she's staring at the red flashing message on her screen.
Checkpoint ahead.
Is she heading to the right border? If she is, who controls it? She knows what a checkpoint means; it means she has to stop the train and prepare to be boarded.
Would the rebels in District Three really have kept the old signals? Shouldn't they have changed something?
Prepare to stop at the checkpoint? Stop now and go back? No one else on this train has been to Three, or Johanna would have put them up here.
She's only got a pistol.
Mickee tightens and loosens and tightens her fist on her thigh, until she realizes she's tugging at a hole in her pants that she can't afford to make any worse.
If only there were some rebel code she could signal ahead. Maybe there is and Johanna fainted before she could pass it on. And what if she approaches without the code and it is the rebels, only they assume the train is in enemy hands?
She's only got a few minutes to make a decision before she'll have to stop within shooting range of the checkpoint.
Finally, Mickee stops the train. She's not in command, she has no command experience, she's not even a victor. But one last failed effort to rouse Johanna to coherence leaves her with the certain knowledge that either she's in command, or they fall to squabbling.
She gets out of the train and goes back to the car where everyone else is riding.
"Who wants to go do reconnaissance?" she opens. She knows at once that she's made a mistake. Johanna would already have picked someone. But Johanna has experience putting other lives at risk.
Ashe, thankfully, immediately looks interested. "Ambush?"
"Checkpoint," Mickee answers, facing him and trying to pretend she's here on Johanna's authority. "We need to know who controls it."
"We don't even know?" Wallace interrupts with disbelief.
"Communications broke down during the epidemic. A lot could have changed." Mickee holds her head high, trying not to let on that she's making all this up as she goes along. That she might be risking their lives based on two words that she recognized from her prewar days that sent her into a quiet panic. "I can't go, because I'm the only one who can get us there."
"Do we even know if we're in the right place?" Ashe's eyes narrow.
"Yes," she lies. "Now hurry up before they notice we're here."
"How are we supposed to tell if it's them?"
Suddenly an idea occurs to Mickee, and she kicks herself for not working this out in advance. Only, when they boarded, she wasn't paying attention to who else was on the team, just doing her part. Quickly, she scans the figures stretched out, sitting or lying, on the car floor.
"Neil," she says, and she knows as soon as she says it that her relief shouldn't be audible, but she wasn't trained for this, "wake up. Wake him up. Blue uniforms, obviously," she adds as they're waking him. The delay is giving her time to improvise. "But anyone can wear a uniform."
Neil sits up blinking and looking around. "What-what do you want?"
"Can you tell if Four troops are holding a checkpoint? We're sending you on a reconnaissance mission. Ashe is going with you to guard your back."
"Well, I don't have the passcodes or anything, I'm just a soldier. Johanna doesn't have them?"
"No one does," Mickee improvises, "it's been too long and we don't know what's changed. And she doesn't want to try an out of date one and get shot."
"Well." He takes a deep breath. "Maybe I can tell if it looks familiar. I only crossed the border once, and that was a year ago at night."
"You're our best shot. I've gotten us as close as I can. You'll have to follow the tracks the rest of the way. Don't get caught."
As she walks alongside the train with Neil and Ashe, though, Ashe surprises her with a sudden lateral move for the engine door. He's darting inside before she can stop him, and a few seconds later he's back out with a satisfied expression.
"That's what I thought." Ashe folds his arms over his chest. "This is all your idea, isn't it?"
"Johanna left me with instructions," Mickee bluffs, putting her own hands on her hips. "You'd better follow them."
"I don't think so. Or, I'll do the reconnaissance, because we do need to make this delivery, and I want to get out of here. But I'm in command," he says easily.
Mickee has to bite back the urge to step down and thank him profusely, because if there's one thing today has shown her, it's that she'll fight and risk her life to keep the Peacekeepers from coming back, but she really, really doesn't want to be in charge. But there has to be a chain of command. If it isn't her, then it's chaos.
"Johanna put me in charge," she insists. She did, she told me to take it from here, Mickee reminds herself.
Ashe isn't even angry, just casual. He tilts his head at the car they just left. "Look, there isn't a man in there who'll take orders from you."
"There isn't a man in there! You're seventeen."
"Doesn't matter," Ashe says. "You're a woman."
When she opens her mouth with the obvious retort, he adds, "And you're not a victor." He gestures to Neil. "Come on."
Neil looks from Mickee to Ashe and back. "You have any proof she left you in charge? Is she dead?"
"Unconscious," Ashe tells him, "and burning up."
"Resting," Mickee counters, "and no, but you'll see, when she wakes up."
"If she does." Ashe shrugs. "Let's go."
Neil follows Ashe off down the tracks, and Mickee sighs and climbs back into the engine, because he's right. It doesn't matter. She could go try to make her bid for power while he's gone, but he's so confident that it won't work that she has to agree. And she doesn't really want power, just wants everything not to fall apart on her watch. Just wants Johanna to come to again and tell her what to do.
Mickee slides in beside Johanna's shivering form and settles in for a long wait.
"Sit down," Rudder invites Johanna at headquarters in Three. He's gaunter than she remembers him, and looks about ten years older.
Johanna folds her arms. "I can stand."
"Sit down." This one is an order, not an invitation. Johanna spreads her feet so she doesn't sway and glares up at him.
"Advice from a former mentor. Pick your battles."
"You pick yours!" Johanna flares. "You want advice? Don't pick them with me." She's gone years without being able to stay on her feet except through sheer willpower. Picking fights gets her adrenaline going, helps the process along. If she sits down, she'll fall apart, simple as that.
"Have it your way." At least Rudder knows sound advice when he hears it. "I sent the train back with the rest of your people to Seven, and based on what I pieced together from your companions, forwarded a message on to Pearleye. If you can confirm it for me, I'll pass that confirmation on."
Johanna's breathing hard not only because of her weakness, but from relief. Everything almost fell to pieces, but maybe they can pull this off after all.
"In a nutshell, you need more troops because District Seven has gotten hungrier and hungrier, and less and less willing to watch food go by untouched as they protect the trains coming to Three and Four. Correct?"
"And the plague! If I hadn't been sick, I could have kept the troops from falling apart. But I couldn't get out of bed." By the time she emerged, it was too late.
"You were almost dead when you arrived. You were sent to a doctor and quarantined until it passed. You shouldn't be contagious any more."
"I'm willing to do whatever it takes," Johanna tells him passionately. "We need this alliance as badly as you do. We can't keep the Peacekeepers out on our own. We only drove them out with your help, and the only reason they've stayed out is that you're keeping them busy. I brought food—I know it wasn't enough, but I'll bring more if I can just get the manpower from you."
"About that, it's a very interesting fact that the checkpoint guards swore up and down that the train was empty when it arrived."
Johanna's eyes fly wide, and the chair in front of her rocks under her death grip as she keeps from breaking down. "We brought food! I wouldn't have brought an empty train! Do you know how hard it was-" Now her people are going to hate her for a gesture that didn't even work.
But Rudder's nodding unflappably. "As it happens, I believe you. I suppose I even have to thank you for turning up a weak spot in the discipline of my troops. They'll be punished, although not too severely, because everyone is hungry.
"Now, as you know, I can't authorize troops to Seven on my own, but it's good to have your confirmation. It's all Pearleye's been waiting on. If you'd died, I think she'd have sent them anyway. I'll send her word that you corroborated the story, and I imagine you'll have more manpower as soon as it can be spared.
"You're welcome to continue south, if you wish, but I'd advise you to go back to Seven and prepare for their arrival. No, I don't know how many."
Johanna breathes deeply while she takes all this in. It's better than she'd dared hope for.
But even expecting an arrival from Four, Johanna has to blink to make sure she's not imagining things when Finnick fucking Odair saunters over to her a few weeks later.
She's outside chopping wood for a palisade, because it'll impress on the men that she's doing something, and then if she collapses tonight and oversleeps tomorrow, she'll have some credit in reserve.
"You called, Seven?"
No, she's not imagining it. Even if that face weren't unmistakable, even now, only he's got that playful attitude. "What are you doing here?" she demands.
"I heard you were looking for some troops." Finnick waggles his eyebrows teasingly. "Where shall I put them?"
Johanna swears and puts down her axe. "I don't know, how many?"
Finnick makes an apologetic face. "Two hundred and ten. I wanted two-fifty, Pearleye wanted two hundred even, she's a better negotiator than I am. Or I was handicapped by not being able to use my best weapon, something like that."
Johanna half hears him. Two hundred ten, where is she going to put up two hundred ten soldiers?
"We've got tents," she tells him. "Most of the permanent structures in the encampment were burned down after the epidemic." Looking up and down what she generously calls a street, Johanna spies someone who should be able to make himself useful. "Stuart!" she shouts, flagging him down. "We need tents for two hundred ten people. Make it happen. Finnick, who's in command? Other than you, I mean."
"Quinn."
"All right, you give Stuart directions, and Stuart, you work this out with Quinn. Finnick, grab an axe and we'll have a briefing."
"So they sent you?" she starts, as soon as he's chopping alongside her.
"I volunteered." Finnick winks. "I always volunteer. You've got mostly men and women without families."
"And you."
He smiles wryly. "Well, I haven't seen Annie in a while." And for just one second, somewhere behind his eyes, it shows. Then the glimpse is gone, so fast Johanna wonders if she imagined it.
"I didn't hear you were coming. What did I pull you away from?"
"Oh, I was on my way back from District Two, reporting back for a new assignment."
"Two?!" Johanna hates being out of the loop. "What were you doing there?"
"That's where the front lines are now. Elspa's leading the attack from the west. Part of Plutarch's army is coming from the east. Eventually we may actually win."
Combined with the arrival of troops from Four, this is the first good news Johanna's heard since the plague struck. "So the front line has moved outside of Four?"
Finnick nods with fierce pride. "Our borders are secure. We didn't even have tributes stolen for the last Hunger Games."
"Oh, yeah," Johanna says, rolling her eyes, "everyone in the Capitol pretended a couple egghead kids with no survival skills were from Four. Or maybe they're really that stupid. Wait—not in Panem? Where were you? Where else is there?"
Finnick looks up, grinning, from the log he's dragging. "Very important top-secret diplomatic mission outside the country. There are other countries, you know."
She kicks his ankle. "Who'd you fuck?"
He sighs. "Honestly? I think it would have gone better with fucking."
"Yeah? Well, a word of warning about District Seven. Me in the Capitol is one thing, but casual sex here doesn't fly. Or it does, but it's complicated."
"Wait for them to hit on me? I'm sure they will."
She kicks him again. "So no diplomacy for you?"
"Well, it wasn't a disaster. I visited two countries, Ayre and Kedan, to ask for aid. They wouldn't send military aid and doubted anyone would. If Snow hasn't set off the nuclear bombs yet, no one wants to provoke him. But we're getting humanitarian aid. Pearleye wants naval help from the west, but we don't have any historical contacts with anyone over there like Thirteen did with Ayre for the last twenty years, so it's slower going."
"I don't need a navy, but can we get some of this humanitarian aid here in Seven?"
"I'll pull you all the strings I can. They're good to have. I was lucky the first set of field medics headed straight to the war zone in District Two, because there's this mutt I've never seen, all scaly armor and venom, and I spent a week in a hospital tent. They call it an armed digger. They burrow under the ground, and when you're walking by, they jump up and latch on to your leg. I was limping for weeks. And don't even try shooting them. They've been engineered to be bulletproof, and if you're going to stab them, you have to go straight for the eyes."
Johanna shudders, feeling the scorpio stingers sinking into her back. "But you're better?" Dammit, if he's walking around with her invisible scars, she's going to scream.
"Yeah, the medics were great. I can't even tell I was bitten. I'm going to try to get some to come set up shop here, teach us a few things."
Can she believe him? Johanna mentally sighs and lets it go. What choice does she have?
"So what happened to the troops we sent last year?" Finnick asks.
"You sent, like, thirty. The ones that didn't die in battle and didn't die of the plague got really unpopular and either went back to Three or went to hide in caves in the mountains so the war didn't get blamed on them. I managed to drag a couple out for the mission where we fought off looters from a train and took what we could down to the people who had ordered the food in the first place. Rudder said they were really hungry in Three and he couldn't keep his troops from looting the train either," she adds, a little defensively.
"Everyone's hungry," Finnick says. "It's not quite so bad in parts of the east, and Katniss has played a big role in that. But they're still hoping to get food from Kedan. Meanwhile, my number one goal, and yours, has to be getting your troops and mine to play nicely. Preferably, eventually not to think of themselves as your troops and mine, but as a single unit. That means you and I are going to have to work together closely."
"I know, I'm already trying to think what the best way to play that is. I was hoping for a woman, someone who could take orders from me without being given a hard time for it."
"Well, I definitely have no experience with getting a hard time for flying in the face of everyone's expectations and flaunting it in their faces. It'll be a good learning experience."
"Oh, shut up." She swats his arm.
"So give me a rundown," Finnick says. "Pearleye said you needed manpower, Rudder dispatched me with what we could spare, now give me the details."
"Are you civilian or military?" Johanna asks first.
Finnick throws his head back and laughs. "Whichever one suits me. One of the soldiers asked Rudder if I was really allowed to give the troops orders and not be part of the formal military hierarchy—which is pretty informal, by the way—and Rudder just gave him a look and asked if he needed that in writing."
Johanna's eyebrows fly up. She can just imagine. "More of that special treatment?"
"Practically codified in law by Mags." He smirks. "But I can't flaunt it. Heavensbee's instituting rules against fraternization, but I'm under orders to fraternize as much as possible. With everyone, impartially. Our line between military and civilian isn't as sharp, since we're hanging on to the militia identity."
"That's still sharper than what we have. They show up, we hand them weapons, we point them in the right direction. Getting them to follow orders is a little harder. Everyone wants to be leader, someone gets some influence over a small group, that group gets something done. Another group has a different idea about what needs doing."
Finnick shakes his head. "It doesn't have to be formal, guerrilla warfare is probably still our best bet, but we're going to need to build a more cohesive team out of those groups, preferably united behind you and me. I'll be sleeping in the barracks, for one thing."
"We don't have any barracks."
"We're going to need some. Mixed Seven and Four troops. It can make a big difference to morale. I advise you to sleep there too."
Johanna just shakes her head. She's insisted on a private room since they set this place up, and they'll pry it from her cold, dead hands. It's hard enough having to keep her back pain a secret when they're in the field. If she doesn't ever have a closed door to hide her worst spasms, she'll lose all authority she might have.
"I'll want to be introduced to these influential group leaders," Finnick continues.
"The biggest is Jack Glenn. He's extremely anti-Capitol, and he's got the biggest following, but he does not work with me at all."
"Sounds like me and Pearleye," he laughs.
"Is she convinced you should leave fighting and making decisions and everything that isn't cooking, cleaning, or carrying water to the women?"
Finnick blinks. "Uh, no."
"Then it sounds completely different. I have an extremely difficult time getting anything done here. If I weren't a victor with televised kills, I don't think I'd have any influence at all. Welcome to District Seven."
Finnick raises his eyebrows. "Is there a lot of anti-Capitol sentiment?"
"Yes, but not as useful as you'd think." Johanna rolls her eyes. "Now that the Peacekeepers are gone, everyone wants to go live in the mountains and be left alone. I've convinced some of them that if we don't help you guys out, the Peacekeepers will come back, but...there's a lot of 'this isn't our fight,' 'what the fuck is Four doing showing up with uniformed troops,' 'who the hell do you think you are,' 'what exactly are we dying for,' and so on."
"Is there any government at all? Is your mayor-"
Johanna shakes her head. "Down here, by the border, I had managed to pull together some miiltary organization just to fight guerrilla warfare against One and keep the trains going through. Then the plague hit, people died, I got sick, and everything fell apart."
"Is sanitation a problem?"
Johanna groans. "Everything is a problem." She hates admitting it, she wanted to fix it herself, but they didn't give her much choice. "There's been a huge backlash against technology. We take pride in roughing it. Every time I try to get anything from Three or Six, I have to fight for it and practically flog someone into using it."
"What makes you so willing to play along?" Finnick asks with a smile.
"I don't like having you here either!" she bursts out. "I'd much rather do it their way. But I'll do anything to fight back, you know that. And I don't know, I've been outside Seven. I like Pearleye, I like Rudder, I trust this isn't an invasion. But I can see why it looks like one if you've only ever cut down trees in the backwoods."
"That's why shared barracks are going to be important. What about communication? Do you have phones, televisions, wireless transponders-"
"No, no, and no. All the televisions got smashed in the first riots. The good news is, their propaganda isn't reaching us. The bad news is, I never have any idea what's going on."
"Let's get some down at the border, then, for our own use. If no one else wants one, that's fine."
Johanna makes a face at him. "Why do you like cameras so much?"
Finnick laughs. "Because I know how to make them work for me. Is there a headquarters?"
"No, we'll have to set one up." Johanna feels miserable, then blurts out defensively, "I killed Brutus." She can't stand the thought that everyone else is contributing more than she is. She talked under torture, and her district's a mess.
Finnick's eyebrows fly up. "Oh, that was you! No one I asked knew, not Plutarch, Haymitch, or Pearleye. We only assumed he was dead because he wasn't captured. Was this after the force field went down?"
Johanna nods. "Just as the hovercraft was coming for us. I drew the Twos off from Katniss after I knocked her out, and I led them on a merry little chase through the jungle. I didn't know if the 'craft was coming to rescue us or capture us, but I was going down fighting."
One Career.
She still remembers it vividly: the haft of her axe slippery in her sweaty palms, the whir of the descending hovercraft, the confusion on the faces of her enemies, the spray of blood from Brutus' throat. Then darkness.
"Well done, doesn't surprise me." Finnick pauses, looks at her with a little concern. "Johanna. I'm not Brutus."
Johanna's about to ask what the hell he's talking about, when she looks down at herself and really takes in what her body is doing. She's balancing on the balls of her feet, axe clenched in both hands, ready for the kill. With an effort, she takes a deep breath and stands down.
"Last useful thing I did," she mutters bitterly, wiping her sweating hands on her thighs. Her pulse starts pounding in her forehead, echoing the line of fire from her spine up through the back of her head. Maybe she can get away with something stronger than usual tonight. Maybe not, she's got a detachment from Four now to organize.
"What? What're you talking about?" Finnick looks baffled.
"You. Having to show up to restore order in Seven." She's scowling, seething with the humiliation of having to be rescued, again.
Finnick chuckles. "Tell me more about how you can't single-handedly hold down an entire district." His eyes dance mischievously. "Every time I hear Rudder complain about being understaffed and underequipped, I give him a hard time about the miracles you've been pulling off here with less."
"But we had an arrangement—I had an arrangement with Four, and I haven't been able to keep my end of the bargain."
"Man, and I thought I was hard on myself. I guess you don't see the requisitions for troops, weapons, and supplies Rudder's constantly pelting Pearleye with. I'll tell him it's okay, you finally had to put in a request yourself. Maybe it'll be good for his ego."
Johanna's met Rudder, and she knows Finnick's mocking words are pure silliness, but also that his teasing comes with sincere approval. She slowly starts to allow it to penetrate, although not without a final, half-hearted protest. "But he has authority, an army that actually listens to him."
"You mean the army he spent thirty years putting together?" Finnick queries. "And he wouldn't have done jack shit without Mags pulling the strings. You'd think I'd have been spying on my own? And what do you think she was doing at—what are you, twenty-three? Last I heard, she was still pulling herself together after her family died, not organizing any secret rebellions. Give yourself a break."
Johanna hesitates, because she doesn't want to admit that the approval of Four means something to her. Watching the playboy she gambled on having substance turn out to be increasingly omnicompetent has given her mixed feelings. Relief and resentment. What could she have accomplished with the kind of support he had?
But she's got support now. Even if it means ten times the work and less chance for self-medication, because there's a spy on site who might catch her at it, maybe she can get something done now.
Life is looking up.
Finnick likes working with Johanna, and he appreciates her work ethic, but she does frustrate him sometimes. He wishes she'd come sleep in the barracks, but she won't budge. She'll do hard physical labor, she'll work from dawn to dawn as often as he does, but she has her private room and she's sticking to it. He had a hard enough time getting the barracks established the way he wanted, mixed district and mixed gender. He could use Johanna's support, but getting her to do something she's determined not to is like telling the tide to go out when it's coming in.
So it's up to Finnick, who always sleeps with the soldiers. Sometimes in one sense of the word, sometimes in the other. One is easier because he can do it on demand.
He takes criticism for it, especially from the stodgier soldiers in Seven, but Johanna did warn him. He does what he has to do.
Cold nights are the easiest: they mean huddling for warmth, and very little real action demanded of him. And the cold gives him yet another opportunity to keep morale up with self-deprecating humor. "How is it possible to be hot and cold at the same time?" Finnick jokes to the room at large, as they bunk down for the night. "This doesn't happen in Four!"
He's used to the effects of sun, wind, and water in a temperate climate. He's not used to bundling up for the freezing cold, exerting himself, soaking his innermost layer of clothing, coming inside suddenly hot from wearing too many clothes for indoors, shedding the outer layers, and shivering from the light wet layer, even while sweating.
"Welcome to District Seven!"
"We come from civilized lands!"
The banter flies back and forth. Finnick makes a point of using weather complaints as a bonding exercise between the Four and Seven troops, but he keeps an eye on everyone to make sure the banter stays friendly and jokes about cold tolerance aren't too barbed.
Afterward, of course, when they're lying down together, the young soldier next to him teases sympathetically, "Teeth chattering? There's a cure for that, you know."
Finnick makes out with her agreeably while he mentally runs over her stats on automatic. Mickee Henders, twenty-two, used to work in a lumber mill before she drove trains, two older sisters and a younger brother left, parents dead in the riots. Part of the first group Johanna recruited.
She tugs flirtatiously on the zipper of his sleeping bag, and he obligingly pulls it down for her. He always does, when someone asks, even if his mind is elsewhere.
"I thought you were past that," Annie said, disappointed.
"Well, no one's holding a gun to my head any more. But my reputation follows me wherever I go. It's easier to say yes, than to say no and explain for the millionth time that the playboy lifestyle was an act, and risk hard feelings. I have no problem ending a relationship after one or two encounters; that's part of my reputation too. As long as everyone gets what they expect, I don't have to do any explaining, and I can get actual work done."
Annie shook her head ominously. "If you say no, they should respect it. Sheesh, I feel like I'm talking to Cashmere!"
"Why do you think I understand her? But no, I know I could say no, and I could enforce it. I don't, because it's not worth the hassle, and it's not costing me anything to say yes."
"Yes, it-"
"It's fine, Annie."
"This is a warmer welcome than I'm used to," Finnick tells Mickee. With all his training, it's not hard to put the right amount of appreciation in his voice.
"Johanna says we can." She sounds half-proud, half defensive. "Johanna says women can do whatever the f-" She pauses, can't quite bring herself to just yet. "Whatever we want. We can fight, we don't have to marry the first guy who asks us...I'm even getting used to bossing men around! She's my hero, you know."
In the darkness, Finnick raises an amused eyebrow. "Did you tell her that?"
Mickee shakes her head, laughingly. "She's scary!"
"You should tell her," Finnick says encouragingly. "I'm not saying she won't bite your head off. But secretly she'll appreciate it. Like me, I appreciate the welcome."
"I'm getting used to doing things that would make my mother turn in her grave," Mickee says. "Besides, it's just you."
"I'm easy," Finnick agrees.
He lies awake for a long time after that. Thinking about Annie, about whether she's right. About whether he can stop even if she is. About whether she's safe. About Cashmere. About Cashmere, lying awake in the arena, holding him while he slept and dreamed of Annie. Cashmere again, keeping watch with Enobaria while her brother slept. Gloss, keeping watch with Brutus while Cashmere slept. The look on Katniss's face when her pedestal emerged. Johanna hollering at Beetee and Wiress after Blight's death.
Finnick's in the process of sitting up, giving up on getting any sleep tonight, when he suddenly stills. Something's wrong. He looks around, but the barracks are quiet. By which he means the noise of a hundred people sleeping in crowded quarters, but no unfamiliar sounds. No, what's wrong is something in his head. Some memory of the arena.
Something about Katniss emerging. Not the dismay on her face; Haymitch told him about Cinna. And she might not love the water, but she could swim, and it wouldn't have fazed her. In his mind, he tries to remember who she encountered when she hit solid ground after swimming through the saltwater pond. No, he can't be remembering right. His mind is just playing tricks on him. And it's not important which tribute it was. It's old history. He needs to go to sleep, so he can deal with the present. Seventeen of those tributes are dead. No sense in hashing over the details like he used to when he was training with Mags. Mags would tell him to sleep now, while he has the chance.
Finnick's still giving himself this very reasonable advice as he gets up and tiptoes out of the barracks. He's had his share of training in moving quietly, and he disturbs no one on his way out.
That said, it's still the middle of the night, and everything is locked up. Finnick gets the tape, no bigger than his thumb, out of his locker, but he doesn't have a key to the conference room where the projector is. Only a few people do, and none of them want to be woken up to satisfy his curiosity. Involuntary obsession, more like. Good, he can go back to bed.
Which is, of course, why he finds himself peering at the gap under the door to Johanna's room. A lot of light is shining out, so maybe she's having a sleepless night herself. Or maybe she sleeps with the light on, like Rudder.
Just a quiet, quiet tap then. Almost too soft to hear, but it's still followed immediately by a sharp voice rapping back, "This had better be important!"
"It's not," Finnick calls, and he starts walking away. Maybe if he just imagines Annie hard enough, he'll make it through the night.
He startles when the door opens behind him, and Johanna's flushed face appears. "If it's you, at least it's bound to be interesting. What do you want?"
"Just wondering if I could get the key to the conference room."
Johanna stands a moment longer in her doorway, then ducks back inside. "All right, I'm game." She reappears a moment later with a keychain. "Let's do it."
"You don't have to come," he tells her. "I promise I'll be responsible with the key and have it back to you in a few minutes."
"Oh, I trust you," Johanna says. "I just want to know what's got you up in the middle of the night. Anything good?"
"Not really. I just wanted to check something from one of the tapes."
"Which tape?"
"Just the Quarter Quell," he tells her. "Nothing that's going to affect us now. You don't have to watch the replay if you don't want to."
"You do?" she retorts.
"Some parts are harder than others," he says quietly. "This should be one of the easiest."
Once in the conference room, Finnick stands and paces while wielding the remote control, and Johanna sinks into a chair and shifts uncomfortably every few seconds.
It doesn't take long to confirm the memory he couldn't believe he had right. Katniss and Brutus meet each other head-on in the first few seconds of the replay. Then Brutus lets Katniss go unhindered to the Cornucopia.
"Whoa." Johanna stops her shifting and leans forward, interested. "He's holding back. Toying with her? Dragging it out like a cat with a mouse?"
Neither of them questions that this was the one victor with the best odds of running Katniss down on the spoke and killing her with his bare hands. And instead he went looking for his district partner.
Finnick shakes his head. "Doesn't matter what he was thinking. What was Plutarch thinking, putting Katniss next to Brutus, who had the power and every reason to kill her before she reached the Cornucopia?"
Johanna's silent for a long time. "Plutarch trusted Brutus?" she says in disbelief. "That much?"
Finnick thinks about it while he fast forwards through the District Two track. His two encounters with Brutus were inconclusive. Both times, Brutus withdrew after Finnick gained the upper hand, and Finnick didn't pursue. He didn't, couldn't pursue or kill the Two tributes, because otherwise his own alliance would have no reason to hold together. There needed to be a credible threat in the arena in order for Finnick to play for time before the rescue.
Was Brutus playing the same game? Both of them had to make kills, or the President would grow suspicious and there'd be no rescue at all. The rebels had had to accept a certain death toll on their side, trying to play a numbers game to get as many as possible—but not everyone—out alive.
But Brutus volunteered. Then he talked shit about the other tributes and his plans for them. But so did I.
He did it less confrontationally, but Brutus was required to talk smack. Finnick was required to flirt. Who knows what Brutus was really like.
On screen, Finnick slows the replay and watches Brutus leave Katniss lying semi-conscious and bleeding on the ground and chase Johanna instead. Johanna moves well over the jungle, slower than her opponents but smaller and more nimble. She may have spent most of her time on a river in Seven, but she's moving confidently through the dense undergrowth like it's the forests of home.
When the picture goes black, Johanna fills in the blanks. Not long after, the hovercraft started to close in on them. Johanna turned to stand her ground and face Brutus, with Enobaria coming up just behind Brutus. Brutus looked up, looked at her, looked up, and she killed him. "I thought he was caught off guard, that I had the element of surprise because I was expecting a 'craft. But you're telling me he knew we had to keep Katniss alive if we wanted to make it out? And he still came after me?"
"He had to at least stage a fight with you for the cameras," Finnick says. "And after that, when the force field came down and the hovercraft started to close in...I had orders to die before I was captured. Maybe he did too."
Whatever else Brutus might have been, he was a warrior.
"That's impossible," Johanna protests, "Plutarch would have told us. You told me who was in on the plan."
Finnick's convinced of just the opposite. If Brutus was in on it, he must have been in Plutarch's circle, and Plutarch never told Finnick anything if he could help it. Only in Seventy-Four had Finnick become fully aware of what Plutarch was plotting, and Plutarch of what Finnick was up to. In Seventy-Five, Plutarch and Mags partially merged their circles, but trust was never easy to come by.
Plutarch might well have seen Brutus as older and steadier than Finnick, just as he preferred to rely on Haymitch. Brutus' unpleasant personality—or persona—would have had as little relevance to his usefulness as Finnick's flighty persona, or Johanna's temper.
"We were all operating on a need-to-know basis. I figured out I had to keep Brutus and Enobaria alive as our cover until the rescue; he would have been smart enough to figure out the same thing about me." Otherwise he'd have had to turn on his own pack, and there might well have been only one victor left before any rescue could be staged. "There was no need to tell either of us about the other.
"It's the same reason I didn't tell you a lot of things, Johanna. Like why I needed info on the roads in and out of Seven. Not because I didn't trust you. But because you were even more alone than any of us in Four. You had no backup support. We wanted you to be able to tell everything you knew and go free."
"Which means you weren't?" Johanna challenges.
Finnick admits, "Mags and I had the ability to get nightlock pills secretly implanted in our teeth before we left, and the Capitol never found them. We couldn't do that for you, so I didn't tell you anything I couldn't afford to have you tell them. That should tell you we thought we'd talk. We're glad you did."
"It's been worth it?" Johanna asks, cautiously.
"More than," he tells her, honestly.
"All right. Well, you can have a key to this room. Come in here if you want to watch something while I'm asleep. It's not like there are a ton of televisions lying around."
Finnick takes her up on the offer. He distracts himself with the news when he can't sleep, and as often as not, Johanna's there. He doesn't ask if she has insomnia, but he can fill in the blanks.
It's not quite a standing date, late nights watching the news and chatting, but it's not quite not. Neither of them comments on it, but though Finnick's glad for her when he finds the room empty, he's guiltily relieved when it's not.
She only makes fun of him a little when he pulls his head off the table in the middle of a conversation one night and looks around blearily. "Man, if I slept bent over like that for three hours, I'd never sit up straight again."
Finnick blinks. "I was out for three hours?" Then he tries to sit up straight and discovers that, indeed, he was.
"Oh, does your back hurt?" Johanna mock sympathizes. "Finnick Odair the hunchback."
Chuckling, Finnick does a few practiced stretches and promises himself to at least sleep upright next time. As he's stretching, he can feel the ghost of his dream fleeing, and he reaches for it.
"I keep dreaming about Mags," he confesses. "I'm always dead, I'm in some kind of afterlife, and I'm looking for Mags and I can't find her." He closes his eyes, trying to remember more.
"Well, next time dream that I'm looking with you."
Finnick's eyes fly open at the sound of Johanna's voice. "Really?"
"If we're dead, I don't have to give a shit about Katniss." Johanna folds her arms defiantly. "I'll even help you carry Mags if I have to."
There are some games of what-if that it hurts too much to play. "I know you offered. I'll always appreciate it. But if she'd hit the forcefield...it's better and worse to know I could have saved her and she made her own choice."
"But if we're dead, we're doing it together."
Finnick smiles. "I'll try dreaming it that way tonight." Then he dares to bring something up that's been on his mind for a while. "Johanna, don't bite my head off, but I'm curious—how come you'll come here to watch the news and shoot the breeze with me, but you're almost never in meetings here? If you're having problems with the men taking you seriously, especially the older ones, it might help your cause if you're here more often. I'll back you, you know that."
"I do enough work!" she erupts.
"I know you do," he says, tired. "Tell me what part of anything I've ever said makes you think I don't. I'm trying to help. I'd like you to have more power, more influence."
"You're the only one." Johanna folds her arms. "But I'll attend the meetings when I damn well want to. And you'll keep going and reporting back to me with what who said what."
Finnick sighs, and writes that one off with the barracks. "You know I will."
"Say 'yes, boss,'" Johanna orders.
Finnick leans back in the chair, closes his eyes. Maybe he'll actually be able to get another round of sleep before dawn. "Yes, boss."