Chapter Nineteen
I did not fall from the sky
I
nor descend like a plague of locusts
to drink color and strength from the earth
and I do not come like rain
- Audre Lorde,
The Women of Dan Dance with Swords in their Hands to Mark the Time When They Were Warriors
As soon as Katniss hit the trees, she felt the change come over her. The sense of tension, of constraint, fell off of her like she was shedding a heavy weight. The trees felt soft and safe and familiar.
She stopped and urged the moaning, frightened line of people behind her forward - 'straight along this footpath,' she told them - and she felt a strange sensation of unearned safety: as if the Capitol could not reach her. But as the line petered to its end - the last few people a straggling family comprised of a wounded father and three young children - her alarm spiked to find Peeta missing: again.
The hovercraft reappeared in the sky as they explained - he had gone back into Victors Village following the cries from the mayor's daughter. And Katniss urged them forward, then hesitated. And hesitated. Realistically, what he had done was suicide - most likely. And he had forced her to stay in her role, to escape - to lead.
But, with a sigh, she turned around and crept out of the safe shadow of the trees to peer out over the open field.
The sky was filled with hovercraft - their dark bulk and their obnoxiously-loud engines. She cringed. They made her think of the scavenger birds, crowding the skies at the end of a massacre, waiting to descend upon their prey.
She heard the loudspeakers from the hovercraft - she could not make out the words, but she could tell that survivors were being commanded from above. Then - she saw the first bombs drop. After that, it was only chaos: bombs from the air, and then bullets started sweeping the sky. A hovercraft was hit and fell abruptly onto District 12. She screamed.
Then she saw movement on the plain - one final escapee from town. She strained her eyes eagerly, even as the smoke started restricting her sight. The figure limped (could be wounded); it seemed to be the figure of a man. He was a long way from safety - a long way from cover.
"Peeta!" she screamed. "Peeta!"
Her body made the decision before her mind could stop her. She bolted from the shadow of the trees and ran into the plain. Then the ground exploded and she was knocked backward. All sound stopped for a moment, except for a ringing in her ears. She blinked up at the sky - red with the sunset, and also red with fire and also with anger.
She struggled to her feet, spitting dirt out of her mouth. It took a minute for her to be steady enough to stand up straight. As she did, the screaming filled her ears: there was a melee in the air - fire passing from hovercraft to hovercraft: they had turned on each other, and the great machines were dodging, diving, crashing and falling. Each time a craft hit the ground, there was another great quake and a flare-up of sparks and fire. District 12 was burning; so was the field. The heat was on her face.
She strained her eyes, but the man who had been running toward her had disappeared. She knew there was no hope, now - he had run into a battle; an unexpected one, surely. Or - was it? Had they not predicted it - that 13 would launch a surprise attack once the Capitol had been lured to 12?
In the midst of the noise and confusion, a hovercraft dove low and a claw descended: oh, she remembered this - the scooping up of the dead. This is how corpses were removed from the arena. She watched the body ascend - she caught a glimpse of the blond hair and she knew.
This hovercraft - and several others with it- was making an abrupt change in altitude now, rising quickly and darting westward. A final flurry of fire and bullets followed. One hovercraft was caught and dived, screaming, to the ground. As it hit, it exploded and Katniss was knocked down again. She landed hard on something sharp - the brittle end of a rock, she thought vaguely. The pain in her back was blunted by her shock - and by her panic. She needed to get up, she told herself desperately. She needed to get up - get back to the trees.
She blinked her eyes several times - her face was wet and everything was smeared. She couldn't get her bearings.
As she stood, she felt the cold metal arms of the claw slip around her. She struggled against it, but a tingling sensation suddenly flooded her arms and legs and her body stiffened, paralyzed and she could only watch, helpless, as she was separated from the earth and pulled up into the dark machine.
Katniss woke two or three times during the flight. She kept coming to, finding herself lying on a hard metal bench, struggling to sit up - only to pass out again.
She had a long and gauzy dream. She was at the lake house and the sun was shining in a dazzling fashion on the surface of the water. She felt herself smile as she turned around to go back into the house. Instead of the bare concrete room, she found the interior to be all of worn wood, like the inside of her childhood home. And there was the threadbare sofa, facing the hearth. There was the small table under the kitchen window. Yellow curtains fluttered in the breeze.
There was a spray of flowers on the table - freshly picked. She approached them and saw feverfew.
"Where am I?" she asked, waking to find herself in a bed, under a white sheet - groggy figures filled the outer spaces in a small, gray room. There were little lights everywhere - one of the gray walls was dotted with red and green and orange lights. A soft sound - a steady electronic beep - was the only real noise.
One of the figures resolved itself into the tall figure of her sister, her fair hair braided and coiled over her head, making her look even prettier than usual. "Prim!"
"Katniss, thank goodness! You're back - back in District 13. We're in the hospital, underground."
Katniss blinked, searching for words. One of her many questions was answered by the sudden appearance of her mother - a few good scratches on her face, but otherwise unharmed. "You made it!"
"Many of us did," her mother said. "Most of us who escaped. At least, I think so - District 13 is still evacuating the refugees."
Katniss sighed. Well - there was that. "And Haymitch?"
"Yes, Haymitch, also. He's a survivor. Without his urgency, I don't know … he willed us all through the trees."
Katniss swallowed. She tried to wait until she felt she could form the words, but this was a mistake: in the gap, tears started to fill her eyes. So, she choked on the question. "Peeta?" she asked.
Her mother shook her head. "He wasn't with you?"
She licked her lips. "He stayed behind - to help Madge. But I saw him - I am sure I saw him - try to escape. And then I'm sure he was pulled up with a hovercraft. He might - he might - not have been alive. I thought maybe - I assumed the same people that picked him up, picked me up …."
Her mother touched her hand. "I don't think that anyone who was dead was brought here - there was hardly room for the living. But we can check."
Katniss spent the night in the hospital and was discharged the next day. Prim and her boyfriend, Crescent, met her with disquieting news. They were not returning to the little home they had made at the old water treatment plant. Everyone was being gathered into the depths of District 13, assigned rooms, roles and responsibilities - drafted, abruptly, into the underground army.
"The Capitol's forces were badly damaged," Prim explained, "in the battle over District 12, but when they have regrouped, they will undoubtedly counter-attack."
"So, we are to hole ourselves up in their target?" Katniss asked in astonishment.
"District 13 is a vast bunker designed to outlast the worst weapons the Capitol has."
Katniss bit her lower lip. That would be nuclear weapons, again. The bunker might resist penetration by such weapons, but the land around them ….
"Anyway," Prim continued, "the outer areas are not safe."
Katniss let herself be led to an elevator and was silent, trying not to give in to all her primal emotions. She had chosen this path - to involve herself in this revolution - so there was no use crying about it now. Giving in to fear - or to this immense and overwhelming grief - would not serve her.
Nonetheless, that night, lying on a narrow bunk in the small room she had been assigned to share with her mother and sister, Katniss let herself give into it. She did not sob out loud, but just let the tears drop freely into her pillow. For him - and, if she had to admit it, for District 12. She had left home, but home had never entirely left her - it was back there, behind her, existing. Did she love it? Did she - love him? The two questions seemed tangled up together, equally impossible to answer - and equally moot now.
Cinna visited in the morning. Prim had smuggled her in some bread and a glass of a sort of thick, green juice - she refused to participate in the regimented schedule imposed by District 13, in which every activity of the day, from sleep to dinner, was in proscribed times and places - and she was ingesting both fitfully when he arrived and sat across from her at a small table.
She looked at him with resentment. She knew she was being unreasonable, but she felt more than a little manipulated by this whole situation - being sent to Haymitch, where all these costumes were stored. So much of it had been her idea - or, it seemed so, anyway - so it all had to be just a huge coincidence - the sort of confluence of events that occasionally happens and just seems so elaborately planned in retrospect.
"If I had had you to dress for the Games," he said cheerfully, "what fireworks there would have been!"
Katniss narrowed her eyes at him - even in the best of the Capitol folk there seemed to be this deficit, this inability to recognize the full weight of a situation. She supposed that it must have been bred out of them, over the years - how else could they watch the Hunger Games with anything besides absolute horror? She shrugged. "It was a fabulous costume. Anyone would have looked inspirational in it."
He smiled, then. "You don't seem to understand … there is something about you."
"What?"
He shook his head. "It. The elusive it. If we knew what it was, exactly, we could bottle it and - well, then I suppose it wouldn't be all that special. So - we just need to recognize it when we see it."
Out of nowhere, Katniss' heart ached. It wasn't necessarily to do with this conversation - it kept happening at random times: a sudden, swooping memory of everything that had been lost. Safety was no compensation. It was no compensation.
"So, what happens next? I hear we are waiting for an attack."
Cinna shrugged, reaching over to push a stray hair off of her cheek as if he was in charge of her appearance. "The Capitol always wages war on two fronts: suppression in the Districts, deceit in the Capitol. The live airing of the 12 rebellion has been a bit of a PR disaster for them. The Games have been postponed a week, and our spies tell us that there is restlessness and fear."
"Games?" Katniss shook her head.
"The show must go on," said Cinna. "That's an old phrase, originating in the circus. Oh, those performers were well-trained, animal as well as human, but every once in a while, the cogs jam, the wheels fall off … but it was considered a point of honor to keep the show intact, to keep the audience intact, enthralled in the fantasy. That is a tradition that has lived on, sometimes honorably, sometimes not - one of our oldest surviving traditions; only in extremis is the play cancelled."
"I will never be able to make sense out of nonsense," she replied. "But - what am I to do?"
"Your show," he replied. "Yours - it must also go on. The Capitol needs to know it was not buried under the rubble of District 12."
When Katniss finally met Alma Coin, self-styled president of what remained of District 13, she was not in the best of moods. She had given herself over to Cinna and his ragged team of helpers - ex-Capitol, most of them, the fading rainbow colors of their skin and hair distinguishing them - still with the strong sense of having been maneuvered into this position, but deciding to accept it as her only way out - cooperation the best way to lead to information and to eventual escape. She had not risked everything to bring herself and her sister to be victims of another war. They no longer belonged to Panem - they belonged to its wilderness, free of its boundaries.
Problematically, there was Crescent, tall and lovely - Katniss' absence had only increased the relationship, apparently, and their mother seemed to be enchanted by him. Katniss knew that love could not be easily sacrificed for survival - oh, these problematic men and their hold over the Everdeen women! - and affection certainly seemed to have blossomed. That Crescent was brave and self-sacrificing, she already knew - and she was prepared to admire anyone who had made the difficult step of leaving their District behind. That he seemed to have settled snugly into District 13 life - as evidenced by his drab gray fatigues and his ease of movement among the different zones - from Command to Intelligence to Propaganda - she was also beginning to strongly suspect.
He came in with Coin, in fact, while Katniss was only half dressed and her hair tied up in rags, her team of stylists fluttering around her with the separate parts of her costume and the trays of makeup they applied in layers.
Coin was very drab gray herself; she didn't need a uniform to exude District 13's particular sense of grim-faced militaristic efficiency. But she did wear one. Her skin was almost colorless (not unusual here where the population had lived so long underground), her lips almost bloodless, her eyes almost without pigmentation. She was middle-aged and her shoulder-length hair, cut in harsh lines, was also gray - silver, nearly white. She looked like a ghost next to the younger men who followed her in, especially Crescent - an effect she surely didn't intend. It made Katniss shudder, internally, and though she had little use for superstition, for a moment it struck her - some ancient fear of pale death in its human form, and the unnaturalness of this alliance.
They eyed each other warily as muttered introductions were given, and all the time Katniss was being dressed and pressed with powders, her hair released and tugged and teased. And all the time Coin stood very still with her phalanx of soldiers in a semi-circle behind her. Along with Crescent were one or two other refugees, but the majority of the soldiers were District 13 - shaved head, gray eyes, gray skin.
"Do you have any questions for me?"
Katniss bit her lip. "Many," she replied.
"I have only time for one," said the other woman.
"I have two - and I can't choose between them."
Katniss thought the other woman sighed - but it was silent, if so, and nearly imperceptible. But she lifted her chin - her own barely-perceptible motion of defiance. Coin might be backed by soldiers and she by amateur beauticians, but Katniss could still draw on the years of wild independence that had hardened her against conventions. "Well, you may ask both, but I can't promise to answer more than one. Time is short."
Bullshit, thought Katniss. Their conversation so far was already the length of two questions and answers - the woman was just fanatically committed to appearing to be in control of all situations. Good to know. "Do you know what happened to Peeta Mellark? And - where is Haymitch?"
"Haymitch," replied Coin, "is undergoing treatment for alcohol withdrawal. Detoxification, we call it - as alcohol is not consumed here in any form, it is necessary to separate him from society until his treatment is complete."
Oh - shit, thought Katniss, as taken aback as if Coin had said they were torturing him - the torments, for Haymitch, would be very real. "And - Peeta?"
Coin was already in the process of turning away from her. "The Capitol has been very quiet this week. They've said nothing to their own people but that a miners' uprising was being successfully repressed in District 12. But there is going to be some sort of announcement about that tonight - which is why I came to fetch you. I thought you might like to watch it with us - in Command. It might tell us a lot about the direction in which we are to aim our propaganda efforts."
Katniss followed in wordless agreement. As she did every day now, she paid careful attention to the corridors and the turns they made - C-12, left, right, right, left, B-12, right, elevator….
Crescent edged next to her in the elevator, which was descending at a rapid pace that Katniss found unnerving. She looked up at him and he gave her a wink and a faint smile.
When they reached Command level, he fell in line with her and walked with her through the last couple of sets of corridors.
"You're looking very comfortable," she told him.
"Huh," he replied, "not really 'comfortable.'" He made a show of tugging at his uniform collar. "But glad to be of some use."
Some use at what? she wanted to ask him, but they ran out of corridor. Katniss soon found herself in a long room that held a long table and a bank of screens - television screens - all along one wall. Coin invited Katniss and the soldiers that had accompanied them to sit all on one side of the table, facing the screens. Katniss looked eagerly from one screen to the other, but most were clearly just security camera shots of District 13 - hallways, dining commons, rec rooms, exercise rooms, classrooms. A few outside shots, where the sun was setting over the wreckage of what had once been the real District 13 - a crumbling pile of marble overgrown with vines and young pine.
They were shortly joined by a few newcomers, whom Coin introduced as her second-in-command, Boggs, as well as District rebels: Beetee, a District 3 electronics specialist; Farrow, a Hunger Games alum from District 10, who had spent years collecting information in the Capitol while mentoring in the Games. "The Brain Trust," she called them.
She then fiddled with some sort of remote control and the screens went dark, except for one, which for a while showed nothing but static. Finally, some human features could be discerned behind the static, and eventually the picture resolved itself to show a close room and an older man sitting close to a camera, taking up almost the entire screen.
"Good afternoon, Alma," said the man boisterously.
"Mr. Heavensbee," she replied more evenly. "Do we have the feed this evening?"
"I think so."
Coin introduced him to Katniss - he smiled and nodded, as if he knew all about her already. "And this is Plutarch Heavensbee," she was told. "Deputy Gamemaker."
Katniss' face froze at this introduction, and she fought against the urge to get up from the table and flee - she felt so exposed. The Gamemakers were top-level Capitol employees, the architects and managers of the Hunger Games: bloodthirsty, child-killing sadists.
After a moment, she let herself accept that the rebellion had made it all the way up to some of the topmost ranks of the Capitol, and tried to take comfort in it; but her body could not believe it; her nerves were screaming for flight.
Plutarch vanished from the screen shortly enough, replaced by a wide shot of the heart of the Capitol: the Avenue of Tributes, which ran the length of the Presidential District in the Capitol. This was familiar from years of Hunger Games broadcasts - though it was a long time since Katniss had last been forced to watch them, it was not a sight that was easy to forget. This was the parade route along which her people had been forced to watch their children be taken - cleaned up and primped for display - along rows of screaming people and banks of cameras to be greeted by President Snow and receive the grotesque benediction as competitors in the Games.
Tonight might be the same - there were the crowds and cameras. There were the broadcasters; the sound was low, so she could not hear what they were saying: what explanations they were giving. Then, she gasped. It was the same. Lurching into view came a single chariot bearing the Hunger Games tributes for District 1.
The odd thing was their appearance: children had not been selected this year; only prisoners. In contrast to the gleaming, muscular youths District 1 usually sent to the Games, this pair was older - in the male tribute's case, much older - out of shape, balding, missing teeth. Behind them came District 2 - the usual toga costume of District 2 hanging loose and unflatteringly on a large man and a harsh-faced middle aged woman. Now, Katniss waited with tense anxiety - for hours, it seemed like, for the final chariot in the parade. There was a disruption around the table right before - when District 11 came out and Beetee exclaimed: "Chaff! He was never in prison. What is going on here?" and voices around the table rose and fell around until she almost screamed at them to be quiet.
There seemed to be a long pause before District 12's chariot appeared on the screen. Katniss' heart lurched - and her eyes seemed to blur, just when she needed them most. There was such a strange yellow glow around the District 12 chariot, so for a moment it was hard to tell, but … yes, there were two tributes in the chariot, dressed oddly - for District 12 - in bright costumes, golden and somewhat - feathery? Two strange birds - not children, but younger than most of the other tributes: Thalia and Peeta.