Haymitch and Effie are kissing, sliding hands under clothes, but it's frustrating, too frustrating, and he breaks the kiss.
He kisses her on her forehead, before sitting on an overturned mop bucket.
"Making out in a broom closet," says Effie, a little breathless.
He chuckles.
"I haven't done anything like this since my school days."
He looks at her with enough interest that she giggles with her hand over her mouth.
It's getting late, and she'll have to go home soon.
"Effie, listen. Sometime tomorrow night, you and I will be asked to go to the roof. We need to go, and I can't tell you why."
She looks at him sharply, as though trying to decide if he's teasing her.
"Why?"
"I just said, I can't tell you. I just need you to trust me."
She folds her arms and shakes her head. He can just see her from the hall light filtering in between the cracks around the closet door.
"I'm not leaving until Peeta and Katniss come home."
"Effie," he says, exasperated, and scared. He guesses he can just pick her up and carry her if he needs to, but that would cause quite a scene. "The Capitol isn't going to let them both come home."
"You don't know that! We don't know anything, anymore. We didn't think we would have two victors last year, did we?"
He restrains himself from rolling his eyes, reaching for patience.
"Why do you think they're in the arena? Because that's what was really on the card Snow picked? You don't see how that's suspicious?"
She scoffs, throws her hands in the air.
"Right!" She's yelling now. He's not sure what will happen if they're discovered. "I forgot every person in the Capitol is duplicitous, and out to get the districts."
"Effie." He's about to tell her to keep her voice down, but she cuts him off.
"I won't hear it! I'll see you tomorrow."
And she leaves.
"Where's Cinna?"
Plutarch looks around.
They're in the garden on the roof. Lyme said she would come get him if anything happened. For a District 2 girl, Lyme's not so bad.
"He, uh… never made it back from the Launching Room."
It feels like an invisible hand is squeezing his heart.
"When… It…" Haymitch sighs, letting it go. "Because of the dress?"
Plutarch nods. "But also to punish Katniss. They beat him in front of her, before sending her into the arena. He had brain bleeding. I think they thought they could torture some info from him when he recovered, but he didn't."
Haymitch wants to ask about Cinna's boyfriend, but this conversation is dangerous enough, and he'll have a hard time living with himself if he feels like he's responsible for the man's capture and execution.
"I gotta get back in. Your clock is moving fast."
"You just be ready for midnight. We're planning the big finale."
Haymitch leaves the roof, goes back to the Viewing Room.
Cinna is dead, and who knows how many more in the next few days? He thinks of being the only one of his friends still alive, like Snow wanted when he killed his family and Terra. If that happens, he'll hang himself like Rendwick.
"All okay?" he asks Lyme.
She nods, watching Brutus and Enobaria, working on some kind of shelter.
Haymitch sits down in his seat, drinks his wine, and tries to concentrate on Katniss, Peeta, and Beetee, the way Cinna would have wanted him to.
He has been walking almost all day. Everything hurts, from his feet to his brain, which feels swollen and full of bad thoughts.
It's getting late in the day, moving toward evening. He's heard the cannon and had felt a savage, heart-twisting hope that it was one of the Careers. He thinks again of Woof, muttering to himself as he bled out into the sand. He wonders which of the Careers killed Seeder, and if he'll get to kill whichever one it was.
Something goes crashing through the trees to his left. He turns his head to look and sees the foliage moving, fluttering as though in a high wind.
Skivver's wide green eyes are taking up half his muddy face. His mouth is set in a rictus grin of terror. He sees Chaff and screams, "RUN! MUTTS!"
Chaff's head whips past Skivver to look behind him.
Alligators. But not normal ones, of course. These can run faster than a human. They're snapping and biting at each other. Each one has teeth six inches long, ending in a curve like a saber, their points snapping through their own flesh in their excitement over two nearby humans.
Skivver keeps running, but Chaff climbs a tree. There's a huge one nearby that looks oddly familiar. He thinks he's passed it before. It's not great for climbing, especially for a one-handed man. The bark is too smooth to get a good purchase with his hand. The tree is tall, but it seems to have more hanging vines than helpful branches.
Still, he manages to get above the mutts. Five or six of them stay behind from the pack, circling around the base of the tree.
Skivver screams, but it's cut short.
Chaff closes his eyes, even though Skivver is too far away for him to see. He hears the cannon and holds tight to his tree.
The alligators are still below, watching him with an awful intelligence in their beady eyes.
It feels like he's in that tree for days, but he thinks it might only be an hour when he sees the sun. The alligators move in a weird circle and disappear under the low-growing plants on the jungle floor.
Chaff waits a little while longer and slides down to the ground, falling, for what feels like the hundredth time that day. He runs, not daring to look back, terrified of what's to come.
Chaff wakes up in the dark, grabs his spear with both hands, and drops it. He picks it back up with his one good hand, and stands up.
Nothing there. He shouldn't have slept so long. He needed to find Peeta. If 13 was rescuing them as planned, it could be happening very soon. He needed to get Peeta and Katniss out and, more than that, Beetee needed to be protected while he worked on the forcefield.
He's still so sick. He didn't think it would take this long to feel normal again. Just one of the many signs he is, incredibly, getting older. For how much longer was a question for a different day.
So, he stabs a tree, drinks his fill, and starts trudging slowly. Sometimes, he could swear someone is following him, but he never sees them. He's hardly in peak mental state, but he's had worse days, and can't get over the suspicion the Careers are watching him, waiting for a good opportunity.
Finally, he finds them.
Every so often, there's a big tree, just like the one that gets struck by lightning every 12 hours, and that he climbed to avoid the alligator mutts. He's certain the tree has some kind of significance, but can't quite put the pieces together. His brain feels like painful pudding.
He sees that he's correct the trees are more than meets the eye. Beetee seems to be circling some gold wire around it in small loops and big ones, and there's some sort of grid pattern he doesn't understand.
Something moves behind the tree.
"Peeta, look out!"
Peeta throws up his spear, and blocks Brutus's downswing. Chaff runs to his aid and sees Finnick engaged with Enobaria, and Beetee hurriedly wrapping the wire around his knife.
Chaff leaps in front of Peeta, knocks him aside. He deflects a hit from Brutus, but the machete neatly lops off the head of his spear. His heart is pounding so hard. He swings low to get out of the way of another slice of the machete, and trips, falls to his knees, landing on one hand.
A white hot pain, unbelievable in its scope, stabs him in the back, and he falls to the jungle floor.
As his eyes slide closed, he sees Peeta, running after Brutus.
Then he's home. He's walking in the orchard with his mother. She passed when he was eight, having Artie. And now, he's walking with her again, talking, laughing, enjoying the sun and the smell of oranges.