All rights to Suzanne Collins, author of the The Hunger Games trilogy.

He reaches in and pulls out foot after foot of silvery, synthetic cloth that's absolutely airtight, but which will be compromised the moment he opens it if he's still in the smog. And without his eyes to see, Peeta can't figure out just what it is he's pulling out, and takes it and runs in as similar a direction as he could figure he was going before. Just keep forging ahead through the smoke. He'll make it back eventually.

I've seen some Capitol people in fire suits just like that once. It was years before Milo was born, when there was a fire burning out the coal mines that the Capitol had to deal with. It was a long, slow burning fire that we didn't have the resources to put out. I remember the gleaming silver suits with the dark screen masks. I remember the tanks of water they had to bring here, and chemicals as well that they dumped into the mines that were nearly as bad for the miners as the fire itself. But it wasn't as bad for the coal.

The mayor then, a little before Undersee took the office, tried to find out what it was that the Capitol had dumped into the place where most of the district's labor would be working. What it was that they'd be breathing in addition to the dust and poison vapors. He wasn't mayor for much longer after that, and that's when Mayor Undersee was in charge. The investigations immediately stopped.

Now Peeta's nearing the leveled out slope he fell down. Not entirely level, as there were some bedrock structures, most of them stalagmites as tall as houses. Some of them the height of two or even three houses stacked on top of each other. And Peeta is navigating this field of stalagmites blind and bumping into them, but as he does, they seem to morph into blades. And he's dragging the delicate- insofar as something fireproof can still be delicate- protective gear behind him, so he has to stop every time he gets a new cut on him to make sure the suit hasn't been torn to shreds.

Against all the odds, it hasn't, and Peeta reaches a clearing in the smoke. There's a sheer cliff for him to climb while carrying a heavy bundle of silver cloth over his shoulders. But he climbs it, just like before, the ordeal is just as bloody now as it was then, only this time when he reaches the top, the tribute from district 5 isn't there anymore. He wastes the time that he needs to don the suit writhing in pain on the ground, but looking at it now, there's no reason anymore for him to have done otherwise. And anyway, he gets the suit on, when another cannon fires in the distance, and is drowned out by a loud roar, and then the video cuts.

I find myself with my head turned towards the screen, finger on the projector's power button. This is as far as I've ever gotten into the video the Capitol sent me. The closest I've ever gotten to seeing how it was my son died.

At any rate, they haven't found the money. That fire suit seems to have been the last of it, and I must commend everything Haymitch did the the money, but it just wasn't enough. Maybe it wasn't enough money, maybe it wasn't a good enough choice, or maybe there was nothing I could have done at all, and Peeta was doomed to die from the start. And I feel like Prim knew this. I can't imagine how she feels about it, but it can't be anything close to the way I feel.

She used me. She made drugs in my house, with my stove. She stole from me and trashed my reputation in the eyes of my family. And now I'm the one under Capitol investigation. I'm the one they suspect, because who would ever suspect a little girl? Maybe I ought to tell them. If I did, would they believe me? Even Aster wouldn't believe me on that one.

Well, it's done now. He's gone. They're all gone.

There's one question that's making it's way all throughout the broadcasts today. I have the projector on because I find it amusing how Caesar and Templesmith are trying to figure it out. "What went wrong?" That's the question. They've been at it for a while now, and even though the required viewing time is over and we're eating dinner, I keep the projector on just because I find it funny.

Not the fact that there's no victor this year, of course, but the way the Capitol is responding to it. Katniss is having a laugh about it too, and we trade giggling time in a way that mom sometimes has to help feed both of us and we have to be careful chewing. Gale got one last day out in the woods from Head Peacekeeper Cray himself, and he was productive. He was more productive than Katniss can remember, which goes far beyond the extent of my own memory.

Three wolves, and Katniss finally got him to keep two for himself, though he insisted on giving us the largest in that case. Her arm is well on the way to recovery, and with this send-off from Gale, it definitely looks like we're going to make it there.

"A game with no victor," Caesar says to Seneca Crane, who looks extremely nervous in the interview hotseat about what might happen to him. "This certainly is the first time that happened. I know everyone's curious," he says turning to the crowd to acknowledge their anxieties, "how it came to be that we're left to reflect on the events of the arena without someone from inside, but what I want to know is this. What does this mean for the games going forwards?"

"Well, it gives us an idea for the upcoming quell," Seneca answers, "and it's a warning to some of us that sometimes our ideas go a little too far." He glances out towards the crowd. His eyes are flickering but sharply pointed like he's calling out one person in particular. "We should be able to recognize the ideas that are actively detrimental to our promise of giving back to the districts for all their sacrifices. While no expense will be spared, every expenditure will be carefully considered to make sure it forwards the good of the people and the good of the country."

"So what's good enough for us?" Katniss says at the screen, and I chuckle lightly. Mom takes the opportunity to give Katniss a mouthful of greens and a bite of tesserae bread. "You made a good call, Prim. It's fun watching them have problems." I smile when she starts playing with my braids. Katniss wanted me to sit to her left just for this.

We continue eating dinner, and learning that wolf meat is just as though to chew as anyone would expect, when Seneca Crane mentions something about a change in design philosophy for the next arena. "We like the idea of the arena changing on its own in a very organic way. If anything, this year's disastrous conclusion showed us the issues with claiming tight control over everything. There's too many parts in the arena to keep track of what changes what, and in what way. That smoke cloud at the end, for example."

"Yes, that smoke cloud. How did you do that, by the way?" Caesar inquires. "Did you know which way you'd have to blow the wind to spread it out everywhere?"

"Actually, we owe a lot of what happened in the arena to Gamemaker Marcellus."

"Ah, yes!" Caesar emphatically agrees. "That crow of his! May I just say, Seneca, that I've never been more terrified of anything else I've seen than that bird? There's a lot of planning in the arena every year, and I think there's nothing worse than the possibility of there being an aspect of the arena know that plan down to the letter."

"Intellect was what X was going for when he made it. I think he'd be really glad to hear it. And you know, a lot of what we ended up doing was feeding commands to his crow and it would go carry them out."

"So the bird's to blame for this- that's what you're saying."

"The bird actually did everything as intended, I just think we severely underestimated the extent to which it could carry out the tasks required of it."

They go on for a while, as mom eventually announces that this is the longest dinner we've ever had. "See, girls? This is why you shouldn't watch the Capitol broadcasts past what's required by law," she puts it with her arms crossed. "You run the risk of finding something interesting."

"Just a little more?" I ask. And after she grants it to us, we start falling asleep one by one as X Marcellus comes to answer questions about his mental health.

I wake up to the sight of Katniss's hand. Her arm outstretched and her palm open and shoved right up against my face. Well, an inch or so off my face. "Prim!" she whispers with the kind of intensity that any Head Peacekeeper except Cray would typically use to shout as us. "Prim!" she repeats, and I groan in response.

"Yes, Katniss, I see your hand. What is it?" She isn't just dangling her hand in front of me for no reason. At least, I think she's above that. But I'm still tired right now, so if she's trying to tell me something clever, I don't get it. Katniss keeps on wiggling her thumb, which- my eyes must be even slower to wake up than the rest of me- seems to be going off in the wrong direction.

Soon she clues me in, "My arm's coming a long way."

What?

Her arm, and thumb going the wrong way. . . I stutter out, "Can you- ?" What I mean by that is I want her to lean over as if to whisper something. I spring a big hug on her like one of Gale's traps the moment she gets close. Katniss starts laughing in her surprise and I can't help but start giggling too. Her arm really is getting better, and when I finally let go, I more carefully grasp her recovering arm to take a look.

Invigorated by her clever update, I examine her right arm with some basic tests. Nothing too strenuous, though now is the time to begin leaving the comfort zone. I pinch her wrist and pull her arm back and forth, seeing how well her shoulder and elbow are handling bending again. Bending the right way, that is, though Katniss does think to ask me, "Is it flexible both ways?"

"Not yet, Kat." I've seen a couple really flexible people. There was this one guy in the seventy-second Hunger Games who almost won. He made it down to the last two, and looked like he could tire out his opponent who was wildly swinging a hammer around. It seemed barbaric, and the whole time I could have sworn that he'd beat her by luring her towards some kind of trap, or wait until she fell over from exhaustion and finish her then.

I wanted to believe that he had a chance. Not that the girl deserved to die, either, but I just wanted to think that he'd outsmarted her. It went on for practically the entire viewing period, a hammer flying all over the place and smashing several trunks of massive, towering trees that must have been fake. The girl was always pushing him back, but their motion felt deliberate.

He didn't take a single hit until the girl stopped. Her breathing was heavy and she put the hammer down, and then she pointed up, and the next thing I knew a big rock crushed the boy and she won. She'd outsmarted him.

But the point is he was incredibly agile.

I apply some pressure to a few critical points on her arm, mostly around the ends and extrema of her bones and the really important joints. She doesn't even make a peep, but is smiling at me the moment I look at her. And I smile back at her, too, because the end of her recovery and her imminent return to the woods- not to mention my trial as well- has never been closer than it is now.

"So, how long is left?" she wonders. I mumble something and mentally graph the progress, how long it's been so far and how quickly it's reaching the target. There's a timeframe we want to hit where the bone has gotten back to how it was before the accident, but nothing beyond that which might lead to a deformity.

And when I figure it out, it turns out it couldn't be better. "May eighth," I say. Katniss gasps at the significance of this date the same way I do. "Happy birthday, there's nothing more I could wish for you."

"Me neither," she tells me, pulling me back into her embrace.

When we pull apart, Katniss tells me there's a little more food stuff on the table, so I take a look at the greens and scraps of meat left and wonder whether I could make a light breakfast out of it. I grab a knife and try to cut the wolf meat into thin strips, but the meat's tough. I hammer it with the handle of the knife, gripping the knife by its blunt side.

With the meat sliced into thin pieces, I place the copper and iron bucket over the fire pit and let it heat up to cook the wolf strips on it. Katniss helps out with the less demanding things like watching the bacon and occasionally flipping it over as I go out for a bucket of water for bread. The pump makes a stringent creaking sound again that startles Lady wide awake. I dump the water out and fill the bucket a short way again. I leave the tin water bucket alone for a while to brush Lady's regrowing hair with my hand. It needs to be washed again.

I stifle a sigh and cup water in my hands to splash over her. I go back over the spot, rubbing in circular motions around the water until I feel the dryness of the fur, and then repeat until the water in the bucket gets too low to scoop any more. Lady bleats when I get to a spot near her right hind thigh, and I start scratching there to see if it's just coincidence. She shakes her head, and stops shortly after I stop scratching her, but then she bleats again, and I don't know why.

After I finally calm her down, I get back to the water pump and struggle to make it work without all the creaking. The thing might be stuck, which I hope won't be a problem for too long. Mom and dad had enough trouble installing it in the first place, and it'll take forever to get it replaced.

Mom's awake now, probably Lady's doing. She's looking at the improvised splint we used for Katniss's cast, that lasted far shorter than we thought. The whole thing just escaped me. Mom must have taken it off for treatment and just never put it back on. I put the bucket down and start looking for something to grind the tesserae grain. The search isn't long; mom hands me a tool and points to a stack of grain she rationed out.

"Mom, Prim checked on my arm a little bit ago," Katniss says, looking for a clean wood block. "The medicine from the Hob has really been working. Prim says my arm will be good enough to go hunting again by May eighth."

Mom nods along until the last word, then brightens up at my sister. "That's great, dear! And happy birthday." She goes on grinding grain, and when we have enough to make dough, we mix the ground up flour with the pump water and press the pulpy dough mix into a loose clump. I take the precariously packed mass of dough and carefully place it into the copper bottom bucket. Mom hands we some washed greens to roast as well.

Katniss comes back with the wood block and takes the meat strips off the cooking surface. She checks that they're not burnt and sets them on the table to cool off and heat up the air. When she comes back to the fire pit, she pokes the bread mass with the same thing she used to handle the meat.

I look over to her and she glances back at me. "What?" she says, pointing out the juices left searing on the iron. She's sliding the bread over it to soak it up. "Can't let that go to waste."

"Really." My eyes narrow on their own. "You really have to go soak up the grease?"

"Of course. It's there. It's also hard to clean, so I thought I'd get to that right away."

I laugh and say, "Forward thinking, Katniss. You're great at that."

"Thanks."

"I mean it. We never have much money, but you always make it stretch as long as we need it."

"I wish we had more," she sighs. "Enough that I wouldn't have to worry."

"But not so much that you wouldn't have to hunt?"

"Yeah, the woods are nice." She looks at me and we lock eyes in a moment of silent understanding. "You still want to go, right?"

"Absolutely."

"May eighth," she says. "First thing in the morning."

I nod. And then I have to figure out how to unload all the morphine, and how to stash the money. This is the most paradoxical thing. If Katniss and I can make enough money that she won't have to count it carefully, that will be enough money that I don't have to be selling drugs at all. Barring any unforeseen accidents, but the odds there have not been very dependable as of late.

"Then the money will be coming in," I tell her.

"Yeah." More money than she'll every be able to suspect. I wonder how mom will take it.

The door creaks open as mom and I discuss something about selling the morphine again. Only, inside the house, we have to obliquely talk about it as though we were having patients out of the house. "I used to treat people in their own houses," she tells me. "You might be able to do the same, if they know we're back in the business again."

"Katniss is taking me hunting. Just one more try, but I think I can handle it. I'm not going to have much time to operate out of house."

"That's fine. We can work around that." She looks around, thinking. "I'm sure you can find someone who can connect you to all the cus-" she sharply turns her head to glance over at Katniss, who's showing the recovery of her arm to Gale. They might have heard it, which is probably what mom is concerned about. "The patients."

"Patients can't wait, can they? I won't have time to treat them all."

"You're going to have to find someone who can prioritize well, then. And it can't be me. I have to manage things here. I won't be able to go with you, either, Prim. You know why."

I do. As much as mom is willing to devote herself to making this happen, she doesn't want to see it in motion. I don't want to see it work either, but it's something I just can't avoid. Not unless I find someone willing to move a lot of illegal goods around, and the Hob is already out of the question for bulk transfer. Until I find someone who'd buy in bulk, I have to sell piecemeal, and that means selling it myself, and that's something mom doesn't want to be involved in.

She's doing enough for me as it is. Her formula was invaluable, and she shows me a stock of materials across the cabinets. Ingredients she has prepared for any future cooks, even though I told her there wouldn't be any. She's stocked up just in case. All of them have complex medical labels that are all "a load of bunk," as she puts it in a whisper. "I'll tell you what's what, but your sister doesn't have to hear it."

"I understand." Because she wouldn't. I have half a mind to say that, actually. I keep it to myself. "I'll find someone. It can't be Gale, and it can't be Mellark, either."

"Obvious reasons, yeah, Mellarks are right out. How about Rory?" I furrow my brows and feel some heat on my cheeks at the mention of his name. Mom notices as much and continues, "Maybe not."

"I- I don't think bringing Rory in is a good idea."

"Why not? Katniss says he's always asking about you." Really? Every time she's visiting Gale's house, Rory's asking about me?

"Is he ever talking about me?"

"She never said, but I imagine so."

"Then he's right out." As of now, mom is the only person who knows without a doubt that I'm Foxglove. That I'm the ruthless dealer. Not another soul in the district knows anything about it. Except maybe Mr. Mellark, but he'll keep quiet. He got everything he could have expected out of our deal.

Gale might suspect it. I've shown him that side of me once. I doubt he's connected the dots, yet.

"So we're not bringing Rory in on this," mom tells me for confirmation. "We don't want him scouting out places that might need your help."

"I don't want to expose him to any of the diseases I'll be walking into."

"You know he'd be willing to, don't you? The same way Gale would for your sister."

"Yeah. And Gale and Katniss know everything about each other. Does that seem like an acceptable situation for Rory and me?"

"I get it, Prim. Rory's out."

"Rory's out."

"What's that about my brother?" Gale asks across the room. Mom nods and bobs her head towards him for just a moment, telling me to go over. That she'll keep on reorganizing the space near the cabinets.

In Gale and Katniss, I see what Rory and I can never share together. Some of the things I hear them tell each other, I've only ever heard before when they were together. Things that aren't really secrets, but sometimes feel like it, since they'll only talk to each other about it. Without regard for who hears, but still only with each other around.

What could I tell Rory? There's nothing so intimate as hunting that we could do together. I don't think I can teach him all the medical training I've gotten over my whole life. And the biggest secret, and not only that, but the very catalyst of our interaction, would be that I'm someone completely different from who he thinks I am.

"Has Prim shaved the goat yet?" Gale asks Katniss.

"She did that a while ago, Gale. I thought you knew."

"I do now," he smiles at her. "Mother asked me to see if I could trade for some of the goat hair."

"We're in your debt anyway, Gale." Katniss looks back intently. "If goat hair's how we start paying you back, I'm sure Prim won't argue."

She's right about that. I can't argue that I'm the one whose work and money paid for both the food and the medication. I can't mention that I'm the reason Mr. Mellark is facing intense Capitol heat for drug related charges. There's no way I can tell them that the only moments of insecurity at the Hob were all acts of aggression on my pat. So I won't argue about it, but that doesn't stop Gale.

"Catnip, I had to help. We promised each other, if anything happened to one of us, we'd help each other out."

"I remember that, but Gale, this is just temporary." She raises and flexes her right arm for him to show once again how fast its coming out of its broken state. "I'm still around. I should pay you back in any way I can."

I start speaking up, "Gale, if Katniss wants to do this, let her. It's not going to hurt anyone for her to return the benevolence you've shown her."

"You all needed it," he retorts. "Cat, you were in no condition to refuse any aid that came your way. You even said it yourself, that we should take what comes to us."

"So do that," Katniss tells him. "I'm not saying I could have made it without you. Without all the food you brought us. Gale, I understand that we needed your help. Alright? Thanks. For everything. But you- your entire family- you're going to need my help when you're in the mines."

"I'll be fine in there-"

"No, Gale, you won't. Everyone says they'll be fine in the mines, and nobody is ever fine. There's some new disaster every day down there, Gale, and when it happens to you, I want to be doing everything I can already. So will you just shut up, and let me start paying you back?"

While Katniss is still breathing heavily, I go and get a bundle of Lady's hair from near one of the tables. I've never heard them argue like this about anything before. I get enough to last a while, even though there are so many uses for it. I hand it over to Gale, whispering some of the uses to him, and admitting that Hazelle probably knows all this anyway.

There's no time for any goodbyes. From the doorway, a very solemn Peacekeeper Cray says, "Gale, you're gonna have to come with us." Gale drops the bundle of goat hair on my feet, and I pick it up after him.

"I'll bring it by tomorrow," I whisper to him, but his attention is focused on the Peacekeepers anyway. For once in his life.

He asks, with his voice shaking, "What's this about?"

Cray puts his left hand over his head and lets out a long, drawn-out sigh. "It's about your job. You were due in the mines for your shift a few hours ago. Now, the good news, at least for you, is that the guy we got to cover for you got killed. Suffocated on something, or some such. I don't remember. The point is, you narrowly avoided that, but now you gotta cover his shift."

"Her shift, actually," one of the other Peacekeepers corrects.

"It was a girl?" Cray turns to his partner, chuckling slightly as he does so. "Not one of ours. I hope I'd know more about it if she were one of ours."

The other Peacekeeper, whose red hair is only now becoming apparent, nods slowly, and possibly sadly. "I knew her," he says, and then looks towards Gale.

"Huh," Cray says with one last jerk of his head. "So a girl covered your shift and died. Now you gotta cover her shift. And I believe there's a little bit of blood money her family's expecting, as well as some other payments," he adds with a nudge of his elbow to his partner, who gives a knowing look, "if you know what I mean. Gale, you have to double down for two months."

"How? Miners already work longer than they don't."

"That's true. . ." Cray laments. "Then you'll have to work endlessly for a little longer than two months, to make up the difference. At any rate, there's no time to start like the present, so let's go."

Gale puts his hands up defensively, and he says, "Cray, you know what I do. What we do," he puts one hand out towards Katniss. "Cray, I can't go into the mines until I know she's ready for the woods again."

"I know what you two do out there. There's a lot of illegal activity out there, and it's a good thing for you that I'd rather get in on some of that than see you executed. See, we're reasonable people. I'm willing to make exceptions, and I've been trying."

"Trying?" Gale picks out. "You've been trying- what? To make an exception for me again? What does that mean?"

"It means you have to go to work now. That's the bottom line here. I tried making exceptions for you, and someone died. Mister Hawthorne, you are the last person on the list of people fit for coal mining. At this point, there are no other options until the next list comes in. That, and the quota's gone up," Cray sighs and rubs his head. "Some sort of situation in 5, they said. And we have to pick up the slack, so the quota's gone up. They want more coal, and the bulk of it is that you have go to work. That's not what I want, that's what the Capitol wants, and we all know that they don't make exceptions. So now my ass is on the line, and I know you," he points to Gale, "want to do the right thing. Just come with us, do your job for- for three months nonstop. That's all it's gonna take. We're all gonna need you to do the right thing here, because if we don't make quota, the Capitol is going to start by replacing me, and I'll tell you this now. My replacement is not going to be as lenient as I am. The Capitol's gonna come after me and whoever takes my place is gonna come after everyone else. You see where I'm getting at? Now we can do this the easy way, or we can go about this a very different way. The predetermined thing- that is, you mining coal- will, at any rate, happen. Do us all a favor and come with us."

Gale stands still and silent in our house and stares down the Peacekeepers for as long as Cray is willing to keep looking. The moment his patience runs out, he nods and starts shaking his head as the rest of the Peacekeepers seize Gale by the arms and drag him screaming out of the house.

Katniss reaches out for him, but the redheaded man puts himself between them. He takes Katniss's good hand and tells her, "Sorry to do this, Kat. But it can't be avoided."

I go to try comforting her too. I tell her to be as strong as she always is, and that this is not the last we're going to see of Gale.

"Mister Marcellus!" Caesar calls out onto the interview stage. Less than a month ago, he called out every single tribute here, and it's normally the custom to have the victor out for a final interview before he or she gets sent home. In a lot of ways, X Marcellus can be considered this year's victor, despite not having entered the arena at all. He walks on stage and receives a lot of flak for the way the games turned out, which Caesar attempts to quell, "I know, I know, everybody. There's a lot on your minds. Mine too. And I'm sure Mister Marcellus has a lot on his."

"You can say that again, Flickerman," X teases as he takes his seat.

Caesar leads with a question about the fiery conclusion to what was otherwise an extremely cold game, "I wanted to ask you first: where did the dragon come from?" The crowd shifts its jeering into murmurs of speculation. Caesar looks out at them and smiles those bright white shining teeth at them, knowing that he's on the right track to calming them down.

X Marcellus mulls it over, rubbing his chin in deep thought. "The boy from district 3 was building it in the bottom of the factory," he says. "It was a brilliant thing, I just don't know whether he thought it all the way through or if he was going mad by the time he started it." His right hand accompanies every single word of his speech with one gesture or another, while his left hand stays still in his lap.

I nudge Katniss in the elbow and say, "You two would complete each other." And after she figures out what I'm implying, neither of us stop laughing.

Marcellus, whose left arm most likely isn't actually broken, continues, "When we caught on to it, Seneca said to leave it alone. I remember someone asked whether we should at least make it seem like the kid was in danger the whole time. It was probably Nellie, do you know her?"

"As a matter of fact, I do," Caesar answers. They both search the crowd of people for her and soon the cameras locate a woman who's just nearly lost in a sea of people around her. The woman, Nellie, looks grown but not yet middle aged, and her dark red hair stands out stylized as crab claws to either side of her head.

She looks down to someone next to her, and when she bends down, Katniss points out, "She's not wearing any heels, is she?" I shrug. Katniss would know it better than I do, if only because she's seen Effie Trinket negotiate high heels more than I have.

Nellie says something inaudible and then lifts up a little boy to wave at the cameras before they switch away. Caesar and X Marcellus, when the former gets the signal that he's back on screen, talk a little bit more about her suggestions to Seneca Crane in the control room. "She's headed up," Marcellus comments. "She's probably going to get my job." The audience laughs at his self deprecating humor.

"Oh, come now, Marcellus," Caesar counters. "You'd be impossible to replace! You built that raven, and I'm certain you're the one who suggested they finish up the boy's dragon project, right?"

"You're right as always, Caesar. I did do those things," again with the fluid motion of his right hand. "Which I think is the reason I'm here. You all want to hear what I was thinking when I came up with that, don't you?"

"Everyone wants to hear how a genius idea gets thought up."

"That's a lot nicer than I would put it, for how it ended."

Caesar scoffs, "Don't mind how it ended. You couldn't have predicted that. We just want to know what you envisioned the dragon doing."

"Aside from killing tributes?" Marcellus leans his head in. He rests his right arm elbow on his left hand knuckles and his chin on his right hand fist, gazing up to come up with an answer. His right hand shoots open, the rest of that arm springs up, and he says, "I imagined that the guy from 12 would have won."

The audience gasps, allowing Caesar to take his time with his next line. And their conversation continues, with X Marcellus getting ever more detailed and vivid about how he thought Peeta would have slain the metal dragon, until at the height of tension, he reveals, "At least, that's the hopeful way to see it. My next guess was that they'd all die one by one until there was only one left. And I thought it'd be him because the dragon was getting really close to that one girl, but it turned out Marvel was still alive. So you all know how that turned out."

And so they spoke. And so they spoke.

AN: And that concludes the Spring segment of "The Winter Frost"

There will not be another update until Summer begins, at which point the story will jump forward into the Summer. Some things to note about that time jump: Katniss will be back in the woods, and Prim will be with her. Gale will be in the mines. Those couple pounds of morphine will still be waiting to be sold. And Peeta will still be dead.

The game is up. It's about time to get down to business.

And yes, the guy's name really IS "X Marcellus"