Chapter 14

Shenandoah National Forest

Spencer

Oh hell. Spencer reached over and grabbed Kat's arm to get her attention. "You can't kill them!"

She pulled her arm away and hissed. "Yes I can! It's them or us!"

He grabbed her again. "This is not a game, Kat!"

She pulled away harder. "Neither was that!"

"No!" She was desperate, that much was clear, on the verge of panic or a flashback or something, none of which could be good given that she had hunted humans for survival in this environment before. He lunged at her and pinned her by her shoulders against a tree. "This is not a self-defense situation! You're not a killer, Kat! This is not your time! Those are Federal Agents trying to do their job. They are not going to kill us and we are not going to kill them."

She glared at him for a long moment, fear and anger and confusion and something else warring in her eyes. "You still don't understand." She spit out at last. "I'm not worried about death. Dying's clean."

Oh. "I'm not going anywhere." He told her, calmly, gently, cupping her face in his hands. "I'm not going to leave you. They're not going to break me."

"That's the sort of thing Peeta would say." She jerked away from him and headed into the woods, but the fierce fire in her had died down.

"I'm not Peeta." He pulled on Gideon's Kevlar vest just in case and started in after her, carefully due to the unfamiliar terrain. I should start wearing boots, he thought. "Where are we going?"

"I noticed that. We need to find a water source but we don't have any iodine. There are waterfalls not far from here. The water will be cleanest there."

"We don't need to worry about being out here that long." He told her. "Once Rossi gets word back to the office the search will be called off. As soon the team gets here we can head in. No more than, um, four or five hours, I'd say. We should be in before dark."

"Right," her disbelief and distrust was clear. "You will be."

"Kat," he sighed. "You can't hide in the woods forever."

"Yes I can. The only reason why I didn't was because Peeta was still a prisoner the last time I had a chance."

"Okay." Was she making any sound as she walked? "I concede that you may have the skills to live in the woods. My point is that you don't have to."

"You think Snow's not going to try again? Tell me something Spencer." She paused to let him catch up. "If they had come for me and you hadn't been here, what would they have done to me?"

"I don't know." Unfortunately he could suspect. "Arrested you, probably, but I would have come when you called me and gotten you out."

"Assuming they let me call you." She started moving again. "And if it had just been you and I and Rossi hadn't been here?"

That she was even thinking in these terms showed the damage in her mental state. "They couldn't have made me disappear. The FBI takes issue with that sort of thing."

"And how long would it take them to save you? I know what happens when you're captured. They took two women when Peeta was captured; I know what happened to them. And to him, I saw the report of his injuries." For a moment the bitterness in her voice was tinged with fear. "I'd like to keep one dream intact. At least until I'm healthy enough."

Wait. "I thought you weren't thinking of that sort of thing."

She stopped and turned to look at him for a long moment. "I don't know what I'm thinking anymore. What's to stop Snow from trying again?"

"Your Snow? Well he's about to lose his contact. Our Snowe is going to be arrested for this; he'll lose the power he has to do this sort of thing."

"What's to stop him from contacting another ancestor? How is he doing this anyway?"

Spencer had been thinking about that. "I suspect that the problem is one of mass. The more mass you have to send the greater the amount of power required. It must have taken a huge amount to send a body back."

"Well, at that point the entire Capitol seemed like a giant battery powering all the traps."

"Exactly, whatever he's doing he would have had to do it during or after that battle, after you tripped the trap, so he probably doesn't have enough power at his disposal to send something the size of a person. But he could send something small, like a cell phone."

Kat nodded. "Or a commcuff, that's about the size of a watch."

"Exactly, some kind of communicator, and the signal between his office and the communicator would have a negligible amount of mass that would be easy to send. Then all he would have to do is look up someone who might listen to him, pick a point in history well before you got here, and start trying to convince him this was real; predicting events in advance, that sort of thing. Maybe reward him with ways to make a fortune so he would be more inclined to be helpful."

"Makes sense, so what's to stop him doing that with someone else?"

"Good question." It had been rolling around in the back of his mind for days now. "We have to stop Snow from communicating with anyone else."

She chuckled at him, "Stop Snow. It's not like we weren't trying everything we had to do that."

Something in her voice was not right. "Kat…"

She sighed. "I gave up, all right. I should have stayed there and kept fighting."

"Kat…"

"What if that's why he's able to keep doing this? What if the rebels lost because I gave up and then they all did?"

"Kat…"

She turned on him, for a moment her self-hatred lashed out. "I failed Spencer! I ran out on them! I gave up! Everything we worked for, everything we wanted, we finally had a chance to have our freedom and keep our children safe and I gave up!"

He caught up to her and caught her by her shoulders again. "Kat, this is not your fault. You gave everything you had."

"Bullshit!"

They walked on in silence for a time, until she tried to lead him over a damp log across a creek. Chuck Taylor sneakers weren't exactly the FBI usual, but after he had been beaten on the soles of his feet years ago comfortable shoes were hard to come by. The one thing they weren't good for was hiking in the damp woods. He slipped on the log and the sky spun and the next thing he knew he was falling...