Chapter Two

I sit on the low bed and pull off my prosthetic leg. I lie down and stare up at the camera on the ceiling, wondering who exactly is watching me - this time. The metal frame is uneven and the mattress is lumpy. But physical comfort is inconsequential. My anxiety, which has been dialed up to the maximum since Katniss walked away from me in the jungle just a few hours ago, turns out to have no upper limit. I don't know whether she lives or is dead. I may never know. They may kill me before I know.

This - more than anything else - I need. Water? I've honestly forgotten the sensation of thirst. Hunger? Freedom? Safety? I don't give a fuck. I planned to be dead now, anyway. Katniss. I need to know.

I hear the soft snores coming from the cell next to me. Johanna sleeps. I wish she would have said something, anything about what she knows is going on. But she shut up on the hovercraft and advised me to do the same, though I have absolutely nothing to tell. I only have one question.

I'm startled to be woken up by a crashing, clattering noise. Clang. Clang-clang-clang. Clang-clang. I don't remember falling asleep and I remember no dreams. A Capitol Peacekeeper stands in front of the cell, dragging his gun along the bars.

"What?" I ask.

"You're with me," he says. "Put on your leg, then stand up, put your back up against the far wall, and your hands up in the air.

I do as he says. With my arms up, I'm hit by the reek of my own armpits. After three days in the jungle, I smell like warm fungus.

"Keep your hands up and walk slowly out," says the guard, pointing his gun at me.

Outside the cell, I'm in a long room with whitewashed brick walls and rows of fluorescent lights. My cell is the first in a row of cells that line one wall. The other wall is like a kind of industrial kitchen, with steel counters and cupboards, a couple of sinks. Last night, I also noticed some displays of knives, needles and forceps - and other instruments I don't recognize. There are beakers, vials, coils of ropes and rubber hoses. It has an ominous look.

I'm taken to a locker room remarkably similar to the ones that launch the tributes into the arena. There, a couple of Avoxes are ordered to strip me and take me to the shower. After the shower, I am dressed in a clean gray tee and sweatpants, and some kind of paper slippers, then marched to an office.

The people waiting for me make me almost literally jump. One is Romulus Thread, the hard-nosed man who is the Head Peacekeeper of District 12. The other is President Snow.

Coriolanus Snow, who has been President of Panem for more than forty years, is a small man, almost wispy. There are no obvious Capitolite enhancements to his body, but there is an unnatural quality to his coloring - his hair and skin almost bleached in their whiteness. His face is so white that his puffy lips look bright red, like blood, even though there's no evidence he wears makeup. (And I guess I am susceptible to suggestion, as I faintly smell blood, too. Blood - and a thick floral scent. A strange combination - probably my panicked brain just crossing its wires.) He's dressed, as I've always seen him, in layers of thick, expensive-looking clothes. Despite the season - it's high summer now, probably mid-July - he wears a heavy jewel-toned brocade coat over a white suit.

I've been in close proximity to him twice before - once when I was crowned co-Victor of the 74th Hunger Games; the second time when I made a public proposal to Katniss at the end of the 74th Victory Tour. In both cases, we were on a stage in front of thousands of live witnesses, and our interactions were perfunctory. Now, real fear accompanies our proximity, and my heartbeat quickens as my mouth goes dry.

I sit down on one side of a large metal desk, and the gun barrel is on my back. I swallow, and wait for somebody to say something, but there's a long, strange silence at first.

Finally, Snow stirs and puts his fingers together so that his hands form a thoughtful peak. "So," he says, "look who was left behind." One side of his mouth twitches, as if in an aborted half-smile. "I have to say, I'm surprised. I would have assumed you'd be a little too important to their plans. But perhaps they don't understand - the way she operates."

She. It's clear who he means. The rest of what he says is not as clear. But there is only one word spinning through my head - so insistent, so all-encompassing, that I say it out loud. "Katniss?" I rasp.

He regards me for a moment. "Who else? Or the Mockingjay, as they are calling her now."

Relief floods me, drowning confusion, even fear. I sink back in my chair. "Where is she?"

He gives a short laugh. "That, dear boy, is what you are going to tell us. At least, if we can't break it out of Miss Mason. To save us a lot of trouble, and your friend a lot of pain, we are giving you the first opportunity."

I gape at him. "I don't know where she is. And I don't know how Johanna would. I-." My mind whirls; now that relief has washed over me, it retreats like a wave, and fear and confusion return. I remember the first of the two hovercrafts I saw last night in the arena; how it seemed to be fired upon by the second, and fled away. Did the first hovercraft take Katniss out of the arena and rescue her? Take her somewhere safe? But who? What? Who in Panem, besides the Capitol, could possibly have the access to a craft? Where could they take her that the Capitol could not find her?

"Come, now, Mr. Mellark. That there was a conspiracy to subvert the Games is now clear, even to the most gullible viewer. You don't expect us to believe that you have no idea where they might have gone."

I lick my lips. There is, in fact, only one place that I can think of. District 13. But - well, for one thing, it seems so far fetched - the continued existence of that place had always seemed unlikely to me, even when Katniss floated the idea in the spring. For another thing - and this is thanks to the Capitol - I am so completely ignorant about the geography of Panem that I have no idea - how big it really is, how much of it actually falls under the Capitol's surveillance. Katniss could have been taken nearly anywhere. "I don't know," I say, finally. "I don't know. The last I saw Katniss, she was laying Beetee's wire. The last I heard her, she was at the lightning tree just before the lightning struck. I knew of no conspiracy. And if I thought there was something going on in the arena, it was just the normal strategizing between allies. Where's Haymitch?" I ask, in sudden fear.

"Missing," Snow says briefly, his dark little eyes watching me intently.

I'm not sure whether to take this as a good omen or not. "I really don't know anything else."

Thread cracks his knuckles.

"Not yet," Snow tells him. "We have no reason to hurt Mr. Mellark. He's oh-so-good at connecting with a Capitol audience, after all. There are questions that need answering, and he would be a perfect - mouthpiece - for that. But think carefully about your current stance. We have no reason to protect Miss Mason. She's said some things that deserve - punishment - anyway. And … Think of District 12. Twelve can be sacrificed to the larger cause."

I look at him, trying to decipher whether or not this is a legitimate threat.

I'm sent back to my cell and find breakfast waiting for me on a cardboard tray, along with a deck of playing cards. "Johanna?" I ask softly.

"Still here, Lover boy," she says wearily.

"Have they - talked to you, yet?"

There's a long silence. "Yeah."

"I don't know what to tell them or not tell them."

"Count yourself lucky, then," she snorts.

I'm left alone for the rest of the day, and any attempts at further conversation with Johanna fail miserably. I try to play solitaire with the cards, but the deck is incomplete, so I just stack them into fragile houses. It's hard to tell the passage of hours in a room with nothing but a bright constant fluorescent light, but after I'm served my third meal of the day, I stop trying to work out what happened at the end of the game, and take off my prosthetic and go to sleep.

That night my dreams are haunted by Snow's hissing voice and his threatening words. I dream of hovercrafts descending on 12. Hovercrafts lifting into the air, leaving me behind. As the lights flash away, I am left alone in the darkness, and I hear them - the snuffles and wet breath of the mutts. The wolf mutts that took my leg. I run, but keep tripping on vines.

The next day (presumably), I'm awakened in the same fashion as before, but this time, as I wake and yawn, I see, behind the Peacekeeper banging on my cell, Johanna being led back to hers, and her face is puffy with bruises.

"Johanna!" I cry, automatically trying to rise, forgetting that my prosthesis is off. I stumble around for it and put it on, just as her cell door is clanging shut.

Another shower, another change of clothes, another office. This time, I'm in a small room that has several rows of chairs, facing a screen built into the wall. I'm urged into one of the seats and look at the blank screen curiously. After my guard leaves, I'm joined by Thread. I tense, wondering if it was his fists that abused Johanna. Also, increasingly alarmed that he is here, instead of in 12.

"Watch."

I turn toward the screen as it lights up and then my attention is captured as Katniss fills it.

It's that last night in the jungle, and now I see what happened in the twelve o'clock wedge. It starts with Katniss following Johanna down the slope as she uncoils the wire, and then I see them stop, Katniss hitch up her bow and take the wire from Johanna. I see the shaking of the wire and their sudden realization that it has been cut. Then - Johanna bashes Katniss in the head. Then takes out a knife and cuts open her arm.

"No!"

But then I see what Johanna is doing. She's removing the tracker from her arm.

I push down on my forearm and am reminded that mine is still installed, just under my skin.

My heart races as Katniss lies on the ground, motionless, while Enobaria chases Johanna into the trees and Brutus sprints in the opposite direction – hearing Chaff, I suppose. Then I see her rise, confused and bleeding. Pale in the darkness, she moans my name, then starts back up the hill. She trips into the coil of wire and I silently urge her on, not knowing exactly how much time is left until midnight. Fearful that what they are about to show me, despite what they said before, is Katniss' death by lightning.

I see her hide from Finnick as he comes racing down to find her; I watch her stagger to the clearing around the tree. (Shit - and by then I was in the 1 o'clock sector, fighting Brutus. If I had stayed … but it was impossible to know...) She only finds Beetee there, who is lying on the ground, apparently already having been attacked. But the only wound I can see, in the brief time the camera focuses in on him, is a cut on his forearm, similar to the one Johanna gave to Katniss. She looks up above where Beetee lies and sees a clear disturbance in the force field, as if something has just hit it.

She straightens out and calls my name. "I'm here! Peeta!"

Then she crouches down, her arrows out. Finnick returns to the clearing and he doesn't see her at first. And she is prepared to kill him, clearly believing that he and Johanna have turned. And maybe they did? Why would Johanna draw off the Careers, though? Or cut out Katniss' tracker? What is going on? And she pauses.

Katniss notices the line of wire coiled around the stick and laid aside before Beetee started wiring the tree. When she picks it up, I see that a knife has been tied around the end. Katniss looks at it intently, the confusion clear on her face. She looks to Beetee, and to the place on the force field that is still shimmering where the weak spot was. She looks overhead, where the crackle of the coming lightning can now be heard.

She wraps the wire around her arrow and shoots it into the force field. The arrow disappears, dragging the wire through the force field with it. Then there's a flash as the lightning strikes - and the video ends in static.

"No, wait," I say. "What about the rest of it? What happened next?"

"Your Mockingjay shorted out the force field around the arena, and cut off the cameras with it."

Then I see how she might have - how she could possibly have - survived. If the lightning hit the tree, but the charge was pulled through Beetee's wire to the force field … Wait, wait. Did Beetee change the plan when the coil was cut and TRY to set up the wire to destroy the force field? He must have tried to throw the stick with the knife and the wire into the field, but maybe without enough force? But … But. Something is bothering me. The wire and the stick were set aside before all that. Were there two simultaneous plans? Or was the coil in the salt lake just a ruse … For the Careers? For the watching viewers?

Who else knew Beetee's plan? Johanna, for sure. Finnick - most likely. Chaff, running up toward the lightning tree at just the right time, pursued by Brutus.

Katniss?

No, not Katniss. But that's not necessarily how it looks. She's too quick to grasp Beetee's true intent. And if she might be in on it, so might I be - stumbling around in the darkness though I was. And this is what I am supposed to confirm, I guess. To admit to a plan I knew nothing about, and to indict Katniss, too.

That will make it easy enough for the Capitol to execute a couple of popular Victors. To rebrand us as traitors.

"Traitor? what do you mean by 'traitor?'"

I look up into the dead stare of yet another camera. For a fraction of a second, a lucid thought - not even a whole thought, just a sudden sense of clarity - illuminates the fog of my mind and I think how absurd this all is - me, a kid from District 12, where electricity was a fragile privilege, poverty the default way of life, sitting here in whatever fancy room, wearing makeup and fine clothes - fine shoes, for that matter, an unattainable luxury, once (one summer, I went without any shoes because my feet were growing so rapidly it wasn't worth the cobbler expense) - waiting for my cues and memorizing lines. Delivering pronouncements to a Capitol audience as though there was any consequence to it all. Ever since the Reaping abruptly ended my childhood, I have struggled with this sense of unreality - of everything I wear now being a costume, instead of my clothes; every intimate thought a public speech; every true thing about me a carefully-crafted fiction, and my own pre-tribute biography a dream, at best.

Someone coughs and the moment passes.

"What you don't understand is that what she did - it is larger than what you think." My voice is curious, flat. It is in the cadence of morphling, muffled - dead.

"Go on." A friendly but unctuous voice. My eyes are dazzled by the bright stage lights, so I can't quite see who I am addressing. If there is an audience, it is still as the dead.

"It's much larger than anything I thought she tried to do to me. She betrayed the rebels - she betrayed all of us."

"This is quite an indictment of our beloved girl on fire. How do you mean?"

I feel my cheek twitch. There is a script to follow. There is always an audience, expecting certain words. I perform for them - I'm always performing. I always have been. Obedient son. Wrestling medalist. Tribute, tribute, tribute. (A tribute, says the textbook, is a smaller and less important waterway. It feeds the sea and its water merges with the salt.)

"She was everything we had been raised not to be - she was not restrained by fences or rules; her very parentage crossed district lines. She was skilled with weapons - like a Career, training for it all her life."

"When she formed alliances in the arena, the trick worked - the rebellion was triggered, just as expected. The wrinkle - the danger - was me. Or rather, us. The Capitol found us too interesting. You were in danger of bursting into flames yourselves. And that would have been catastrophic. So - under the lie that it was meant to quell the Districts, we were sent off to satisfy the Capitol that our love story was strong and government-sanctioned. A party. A public engagement - her idea, of course.

"But then, her use done, she had to be eliminated in the Quell. And me with her - Haymitch made sure of that - and others with us. Unfortunate, but unavoidable. Written into the system. Sealed by time. And that was how they used her. To expose the rebels, so they could be squashed."

"Deliberately?"

I shrug. "As deliberately as a mutt possibly could."

"Mr. Mellark." The voice has changed, and I blink, find myself looking up into the bright silver light from the ceiling.

"Who are you, again?" I ask the man sitting across from me. "Who are you?!" I struggle against bonds - the physical ones on my arms, the psychic ones of the drugs. Anger - sweet fucking anger - gives me energy again. "Who are you!?"

He is dull of expression and simply raises his eyebrows and the tubes swell and my arms grow cold, and all of me follows.