Chapter Twenty

I bend down and put my elbows on my knees, my face in my palms. "They're poisonous? But how did she - why did she ...?"

"She was taking food from the career pile like that - just a little bit. Enough to stay alive, but not enough to draw them after her. She probably just took a couple; you would never have noticed. And she would not have questioned the safety of berries we were about to eat."

That makes it worse. Like she trusted me, and I betrayed her somehow. "I wonder how she found us. My fault, I guess, if I'm as loud as you say."

Katniss puts a comforting hand on my shoulder. "And she's very clever, Peeta. Well, she was. Until you outsmarted her."

I push away from her hand and stand up. I feel the tang of bile in the back of my throat. I guess if Katniss cares about what is owed and what is owing, I care about the injustice of it all - District 8, killed in her sleep; District 5 - killed by my berries. "Not on purpose," I say bitterly. "Doesn't seem fair somehow. I mean, we would have both been dead, too, if she hadn't eaten the berries first." I pause on the thought. "No, of course not. You recognized them, didn't you?"

She nods. "We call them nightlock."

"Even the name sounds deadly. I'm sorry, Katniss. I really thought they were the same ones you'd gathered."

"Don't apologize. It just means we're one step closer to home, right?"

That's true - just like it was true with Thresh. But, like Katniss, I'm having a hard time celebrating. "I'll get the rest," I say glumly. I gather up the plastic sheet by all its corners, so that the berries are bunched inside, but Katniss stops me.

"Wait!"

She pulls out a leather pouch from the pack and funnels the berries into it. "If they fooled Foxface, maybe they'll fool Cato as well. If he's chasing us or something, we can act like we accidentally drop the pouch and, if he eats them …."

"Hello District 12," I finish softly. I'm not being very consistent, I know, but that sounds like the perfect solution to our current problems.

"That's it," she smiles up at me.

"He'll know where we are now," I realize suddenly. "If he was anywhere nearby, and saw that hovercraft, he'll know we killed her and come after us."

She nods and regards me for a while, then the pack and the trees and her catch - which I see includes squirrel and rabbit. "Let's make a fire," she says. "Right now."

"Are you ready to face him?"

"I'm ready to eat. Better to cook our food while we have the chance. If he knows we're here, he knows. But he also knows there's two of us and probably assumes we were hunting Foxface. That means you're recovered. And the fire means we're not hiding, we're inviting him here. Would you show up?"

"Maybe not," I say. I'm not sure if Cato's motivations can always be guessed at, though, through logic.

I gather wood - as dry as I can, though everything that is not green is still somewhat damp from the days of rain. But maybe the one thing I did learn during the week of training is how to make a fire in the dampest conditions, so I've soon got a blaze going. Katniss skins her kill and chops the rabbit in pieces. We gather some rocks by the stream to prop up skewers of rabbits and squirrels. Katniss lets the fire die down to coals on one side, and she and I wrap the roots up in leaves, and place them right on the coals to bake. It doesn't take long for the smell of the meat to make my mouth water, and all the time she tends the food, I glance at her and think how fortunate she was - we are - to have had her father to teach her these skills in the woods.

Katniss packs most of it up, except for two rabbit legs. "I think we should go deeper into the woods. Find a tree to sleep in."

I shake my head. "I can't climb like you, Katniss, especially with my leg, and I don't think I could fall asleep that high off the ground."

"It's not safe to stay in the open."

"Can't we go back to the cave? It's near water and it's easy to defend."

She sighs - and glances behind her shoulder at the trees, as if they are literally calling to her. When she turns back to me, she smiles, comes over to me, stands on her tiptoes, and gives me a kiss. "Sure, let's get back to the cave."

I smile back. "Well, that was easy."

While she retrieves her arrow, I throw a bunch of wood on the fire to make it look like we're camped out here for good. Katniss hands me a rabbit leg to eat while we walk and we go back down to the stream and follow it back to the cave.

This takes longer than I would have thought and I'm exhausted long before get back there. And my leg, although definitely clear from infection, has taken real damage - to the tendons and muscles I guess - and stiffens up after too much exertion.

"I see your point about not wanting to walk back here," I confess, once we get inside.

"Yes - although - the wind's coming up and it's going to be cold tonight up in the trees. And - it's good to have walls around us."

In fact, it's almost homey. Katniss rations out the food we cooked earlier in half, then halves it again for our dinner. It's delicious - fresh, still a little warm. But my eyelids start drooping almost immediately.

"You need to sleep, don't you?" she smiles.

"I do. Are you OK for now? I probably need only a couple of hours."

"I can give you at least four. I'll set your plate aside and you can eat then. Now, get into the bag and get some sleep."

I'm already starting to snore as I'm laying my head down, and I am just faintly aware of her pulling the sleeping bag up to my chin and kissing me on the forehead before I crash.

When she wakes me, the sky is starting to lighten and I bolt upright. "I slept the whole night! Katniss, you should have woken me up!"

"I had too much to think about to sleep," she says, yawning. We switch places and she crawls into the sleeping bag. "Wake me up if things get interesting."

I finish up last night's dinner, then occupy myself for a while drawing pictures on the floor, one ear always listening for a trace of sound outside our cave. I am in a heightened state of anxiety, and am filled with foreboding. It started yesterday, when the cloak of the rainstorms receded. But it's worse today, with just Cato remaining. We can't tell ourselves he's hunting anyone else. One good thing about being in here is I know Cato will make a lot of noise scrabbling up the rocks to find us. Unless time has taught him to be softer. Still, it's excruciating waiting for any faint sound that would warn of his coming. I jump to my feet probably five times this morning. And when I go outside to pee, I feel ten times more vulnerable than usual.

When Katniss wakes up on her own, it's the afternoon. She stretches and smiles. "Any sign of our friend?"

"No, he's keeping a disturbingly low profile."

"How long do you think we'll have before the Gamemakers drive us together?"

That's the question I've been asking myself all day. "Well, Foxface died about 24 hours ago, so there's been plenty of time for the audience to get bored. I guess it could happen at any moment."

"Yeah, I have a feeling today's the day," she says, sitting up. "I wonder how they'll do it."

We find out once we go outside.

Katniss has declared it another hunting day, and we eat most of the food from yesterday, pack everything else up and arm ourselves. Katniss takes time to pat the rocks outside the cave entrance - as if in farewell - and I do get the feeling, the gnawing sensation, that I will never see the cave again.

We clamber down to the stream and find it has vanished. The water - so high yesterday from the days of rain, is completely gone.

Katniss makes a disappointed noise, then reaches down into the stream bed. "It's not even a little damp. They must have drained it while we slept."

"Good thing our water bottles are full," I say.

"For now."

"The lake. That's where they want us to go."

Katniss bites her lower lip. "Maybe the ponds will still have some water."

"We can check," I say. I don't think there's a hope of it, but it puts off the confrontation with Cato for a little while longer.

We go back to where I buried myself, then cut into the woods and follow the treeline back until we break off and find the pond where the careers and I found Katniss the day of the fire. Probably not so many days - surely, less than two weeks - have passed since then, but so much has happened that that day seems to belong to my previous life.

The pond is also dry.

"You're right," she says. "They're driving us to the lake. Do you want to go now, or wait until we're out of water?"

To me, even worse than thirst is this horrible dread. "Let's go now, while we've had food and rest. Let's just - go end this thing."

She nods, and turns to look south, in the direction of the cornucopia. I put my arms around her, resting my chin on top of her head; she resting her chin on my arms. "Two against one," I say into her hair. "Should be a piece of cake."

"Next time we eat, it will be in the Capitol," she says, resolutely.

"You bet it will."

Yet, we stay for a minute like this, standing together. I can feel her heartbeat against my arms. I can feel my heartbeat against her back. Against all conceivable odds, she has survived all the way to this final opponent. And, against all odds even more remote, I am here with her. But we still have to commit one final, unchangeable, unforgivable act.

On that, as if we can read each other's minds, we break apart and move on. A little north of the pond is the place just in the woods where she dropped the tracker jacker nest on us. The nest itself is largely dissolved. Katniss touches it with her boot and it crumbles. She looks up at the tall tree. "Let's move on," she says, darkly. I'm not altogether fond of the spot myself.

We hike back over the uneven ground and finally get to the cornucopia a little before sunset. Katniss shows me the spot where tributes can hide and spy on the plain without being seen. After waiting for a while with no sign of Cato, we carefully walk to the cornucopia, approach the mouth of it from different sides, and check inside to see if he's hiding there. Then we walk over to the lake and I fill our bottles and purify them. Katniss stands over me, tapping her foot anxiously.

"We don't want to fight him after dark. There's only the one pair of glasses."

"Maybe that's what he's waiting for. What do you want to do? Go back to the cave?"

"Either that or find a tree." She looks at me as if waiting for my argument, but I have none. She'll be safe in a tree, at least. "But let's give him another half hour or so. Then we'll take cover."

We sit by the lake, close but looking away from each other; she watches the woods, I watch the field. She sings a small, four-note melody, and the birds in the woods pick up her call. Mockingjays, I guess. The air is eventually filled with their trilling, and in their voices, the melody becomes a harmony.

"Just like your father," I say.

"That's Rue's song," she whispers. "I think they remember it."

Then she stiffens, and a moment later, I hear it, too; a strange dissonance in the melody, and then a shrieking sound.

We jump to our feet, weapons out. Then Cato comes out of the trees, heading toward us. He has no weapons in his hands - did he somehow lose them? Katniss lets the arrow fly and I hold my breath, but the arrow just bounces off his chest. "He's got some kind of body armor!" she cries.

He's right on us - eyes bulging, sweating, panting, and I brace myself to try to catch his neck or something with the knife, but he bolts right past us, then turns toward the cornucopia.

There's a wild howl from the direction of the trees. A large creature of some kind, wolfish maybe, leaps out onto the meadow. Others join it. Katniss runs without hesitation after Cato, toward the cornucopia, and I follow.