Chapter 3
Later still, the group barely evades a Smoker ambush. Katniss finally lets out her frustration and demands to know where Dryland is.
"I've sailed farther than anyone, and I've never seen it!" Peeta yells.
"Then what about all this stuff on your ship? Where else could you have gotten it? The crayons... and the music box! That dirt you brought into Atoll 12!"
Peeta gives her a long, hard look. "You wanna see Dryland? I'll take you to Dryland."
He prepares a diving bell he clearly fashioned himself. Katniss can't help but think that Haymitch would be impressed. The diving bell only has room for one passenger. "Get in," Peeta tells Katniss. They'll have to leave Prim onboard.
With the help of his gills and under the guidance of a timed pulley system, Peeta takes them down. Katniss can only stare in amazement as they sink to the ocean floor to behold the submerged ruins of an ancient city. She observes as Peeta collects fistfuls of dirt from the seabed and deposits it into a jar.
When the pair finally surface with the diving bell, she can only shake her head in wonder.
"I never realized..."
"Nobody did," Peeta mumbles.
The moment is broken by armed men - Smokers - surrounding them, taking them captive. They've taken over the tamarin. Katniss frets as her eyes dart about. There is no sign of Primrose.
The leader of the Smokers, a man with an eyepatch who calls himself Snow, demands to know where "the girl with the map to Dryland" is. Katniss's heart sinks as it dawns on her: the seaplane. The Smoker ambush, both out here on the water and at Atoll 12. These men have been looking for her sister; they think the birthmarks on her back can lead them to Dryland.
Snow threatens to kill both of them, or at least the one who doesn't give up Prim first. Prim takes his bluff, revealing herself from her hiding place. The Smokers seize her and set the tamarin on fire.
In the chaos, as the boat starts to tilt, in danger of capsizing, Peeta and Katniss leap over the side. Katniss panics.
"I can't swim like you can!"
"You won't have to! I can breathe for the both of us!" Gulping in a breath, they both submerge.
Katniss knows she can't hold her breath for very long. When Peeta suddenly grabs her skull, she wriggles and thrashes for a moment before he firmly yanks her head close...
... and kisses her full on the mouth.
Katniss gasps in astonishment, swallowing some water. Peeta merely presses his lips against hers and kisses her more deeply, parting her lips, working her mouth open in a hot, messy rhythm so he can breathe fresh air into her lungs.
Katniss breathes. Humming curiously, she lifts a hand to caress his face. Eyelids drooping so that her lashes flutter, she feels herself kiss him back.
A Kiss of Life. And though she never expected her first kiss to be underwater, Katniss confesses it is perfect.
Peeta and Katniss finally surface to find the charred hull of the tamarin lying on its side, only half-submerged. They lean against it, adrift. Primrose is gone, and her captors with her.
Disconsolate, her flushed mouth still tingling from his kiss, Katniss works up the nerve to ask:
"When I offered myself to you, why didn't you take me?"
Peeta gazes at her sadly. "Because you didn't want me. Not really. It wouldn't have been fair -"
She brings her face quite close, kissing him softly. "I want you now," she hisses, her voice husky. She deepens the kiss, and feels Peeta return it. Dipping her back and pressing her along the tilted hull of the tamarin, she willingly spreads her legs for him. With every undulation, every thrust of their enjoined hips, ripples percolate out from where they now frantically fuck half-submerged in water. As the couple embrace and make love, Katniss moans shamelessly into her handsome sailor's ear:
"Huhhhh... Uhhhh... Hmmmm... Mmmm... UHHHH! HUHHHH! AHHHH!"
She cries out happily when he makes her cum, and again when he ejaculates deep inside her.
Katniss drifts off to sleep against the tamarin when she and Peeta finish having sex. When she stirs awake, it is just in time to see him surface from amidst the boat's burned ruins. She draws what's left of her ripped blue dress around herself.
"How long have I been asleep?"
Peeta merely holds up a copy of an ancient magazine called National Geographic. He thinks he's deciphered where Dryland is - and thus, perhaps where they can find Prim.
Just then, who should appear but Haymitch in his dirigible. He extracts Katniss and her lover from the water, and they fly to the Smokers' tanker, which has been tracked by the surviving Elders of Atoll 12. Peeta bravely storms the ship and rescues Prim, blowing the ship, Snow and his goons up.
Haymitch is the one to finally decode the tattoos on Prim's back, reversing the coordinates and piloting them to Dryland.
Katniss, Prim and the survivors of Atoll 12 begin to rebuild their home on true land.
But Peeta is being called back to the sea. Learning of his intent to go, a despondent Prim runs away in tears. Peeta kisses Katniss goodbye, and she allows it, holds it. Wanting to keep something of him.
That evening, the Everdeen sisters watch as Peeta's tamarin casts off for the horizon. They wave goodbye.
Months later, when Katniss falls pregnant with the mysterious sailor's child, she names their son Peeta, after his father.
