Finch walked out of the cave and had to shield her eyes from the glaring sunlight. After her eyes had adjusted, she retreated to the woods, careful to erase any trace that she had been there, and headed back the way that she had come.
When she got back to the rabbit dangling from the snare trap, it was nearly bled dry. Instead of cutting the snare down, she cleaned up the blood and placed a twig in the sprung snare where the rabbit had been, then stepped back to examine the arrangement. If the girl came to check on it later, it would look as if the snare had been tripped by an errant twig blowing in the breeze.
On the way back to her hideout, she made a point to note landmarks so that she could easily return without having to be too close to the stream. A gnarly old tree stump, a set of boulders leaning on each other, a particularly strange looking knot in the fork of an oak tree. As she walked, the thought about what had just happened.
The gamemakers would clearly have expected her to kill those two. Why else would they have let her come here? Did they think that she had defied them? If so, the gamemakers would make her a target that much more quickly, which was something that she was rather trying to avoid.
As she got close to her cave, a clash of thunder rang out across the valley and it began to rain. She ran back the rest of the way, gathering wood to use as kindling as she went. It was difficult for her to find wood that was dry enough to start a fire with, but she eventually found a thick evergreen tree, where the dense upper branches sheltered the dead lower ones from the downpour.
Hoping that the rain would conceal the smoke, Finch built a fire at the edge of her cave using one of the matches she had taken from the girl from District 12. She roasted the stolen meat along with the rabbit she had pulled from the snare.
After cooking and eating the meal, she sat beside the fire to keep warm. Though there was still daylight reaching through the sheets of rain, it was already beginning to get colder. The rain continued to fall throughout the afternoon and into the night.
Finch was chewing on the bone of a rabbit leg in the small nest that she had made out of pine needles when she heard the anthem blare out. She crawled to the edge of the cave and could faintly see the symbol of the capitol displayed through the rainstorm. After the anthem, the face of Clove from District 2 appeared for a brief moment before being replaced again by the symbol of the capitol.
So it was just Cato, Thresh, and the two from District 12 left. Finch retreated back into the cave and sat down by the fire. She had eaten most of the food she had scavenged that day; She wasn't full, but her hunger had subsided for the first time in days. This combined with the soft pattering of the rain and the warmth of the fire allowed her to easily drift off to sleep.
Finch was standing just inside of the ancient oak door of the apothecary. Aside from the dim bulbs hanging from the ceiling, the place had an ancient feel to it. In here, she could almost forget what century she lived in. As if she had stepped back in time to a place where the games did not exist.
Agatha wasn't behind the counter, so she expected that she was out back tending to the myriad of herbs and plants that made up her garden.
Walking down the front aisle, Finch breathed in the fumes from the various concoctions, vaguely aware that this may be the last time that she would ever get the chance to smell them. "No", she shook her head. You can't think thoughts like that. The chances of my name being called are basically zero.
This offered her little reassurance, however, and the thought that these might be her last days lingered in Finch's mind.
She distracted herself from the thought by naming the various herbs placed on the shelves. Finch had prided herself in learning them, though she knew that there was little real purpose in it. In a couple of years, she would be given a job in the power plants just like everyone else. It seemed that the capital always needed power and never had enough people working in the plants. As soon as she turned 18, she would join the others in the laborious work that the solar plants had to offer.
Everyone else knew it and had accepted it as their ultimate fate, but Finch still had hope that she could find a way out of this dark, gloomy destiny that nobody seemed to be able to escape. If Agatha could do it, then she could too. Anyway, she still had three years to make a plan.
Finch cleared the end of the aisle and spotted the back door, partially obscured by the hanging vines of plants that she did not recognize. She made a mental note to ask Agatha about them later. The door was propped open and a stream of light was beckoning her out and into the back garden, so she stepped through.
Outside, it was raining. A crack of thunder echoed through the room.
Finch woke from the dream with a start and bolted upright.
Something felt wrong.
