Chapter Six
"People took sides in the argument, but I took the goat."
As usual, when I hear her voice - especially when I see a recording from the Games - my heart races like crazy. This time, no sooner it does, even a little bit, than the morphling courses through my veins - but it's different, definitely different. Something about the dosage makes me feel light-limbed instead of heavy, and pleasantly detached from my surroundings. So, even though I wonder why they have chosen to show this clip - with its dismal ending - I approach it with indifference just barely approaching curiosity.
It seems so - sharp. There is no music and the camera doesn't really cut around very much, as it did when the Capitol showed it to us after the Games. It's darker than it was when we watched it then, too - our faces are shadowed so expressions are hard to read. I can hear things I shouldn't hear - the sound of movements too close to the hidden microphones, so when she moves, just an inch, the sound of it roars through the screen. I can hear my heavy breath. And I'm missing something, something barely remembered - something fuzzy about the edges of the screen ….
"So, Gale offered to carry her. I think he wanted to see the look on Prim's face as much as I did. As a total impulse, I bought a pink ribbon and tied it around her neck. Then we hurried back to my house. You should have seen Prim's reaction when we walked in with that goat! She was so excited, crying and laughing all at once. My mother was less sure, seeing the injury, but the pair of them went to work on it, grinding up herbs, and coaxing brews down the animal's throat."
"They sound like you," says the white-faced boy on the screen. His rapt face is focused on the mutt in a sickening expression that shines through even the dimness of the scene. I wince, waiting for the final blow - I remember it so precisely, Katniss telling me about how Gale craved the goat meat so badly that she killed it and told her sister that it had died overnight. Then she gave the meat to Gale, hoping to coax him into one of his more agreeable moods.
"Meaning what?" I will ask her.
And she'll bend low and put her warm mouth near my ear. And whisper some things that I can't remember, but which made me blush in embarrassment. I can already almost see the bright silver light start on the edges of the screen - I remember it now - that video blip that always precedes this part.
But that's not what happens.
"Oh, no," says the girl on the screen. "They work magic. That thing couldn't have died if it tried."
I close my mind, trying to reset it - trying to make the false images go away. I trusted Prim. I trusted her. But, as I suspected all along, 13 is trying to fill my mind with the sickness, again. To make me forget she is my enemy…
The drug courses through me, like fingers relaxing me, one limb at a time. I can't help but smile, which seems wrong, somehow. My eyes go in and out of focus, and then everything goes sideways. …
.
.
.
… And I jolt awake, with no memory of having slept. My arms are restrained, and the light has changed. It's brighter, more unnatural. My muscles are tense, my tendons stretched out like rubber bands. What happened, and why? Out of the corner of my eye, I see a large screen, flickering with an image that is so familiar to me. It's the cave, the cave where she kept me safe. I see our silhouettes in shadows on the wall - she bending over my prone figure with her braid over her shoulder. Katniss.
"It's hard to keep his attention," she's saying to me. "He's so popular with the girls."
There's something wrong with the audio - her voice has a slight, unnatural echo. And there is something wrong with her words.
"I know he is," I choke out.
"But he likes my kills. Oh, he likes my kills. Just like you do, don't you Peeta? What would you trade for kisses? Would it take a full goat? Or are you easier than Gale?"
Wait. What is going on? This isn't how it went. Not even in my most self-loathing fantasies about what she was really thinking in the arena - this is not how it went.
"What the fuck?" I say, and there is a flash - a small flash of pain - and a shock goes through my body….
"Peeta? Peeta? Hey, he's awake! He's awake." Prim's insistent voice breaks through my black-out and I blink up into the bright, silvery light that floods the ceiling. I flop my head around, and I see Haymitch yawning in a chair next to me.
"Whu …" I say groggily.
"For fuck's sake, you need to stop scaring us like that."
I wipe saliva off my mouth and cheek. "Where am I?"
"Same place," grunts Haymitch, as medics rush into the room, checking on my monitors and my fluid levels. Keeping the machine of my body running even as my scrambled brain fades in and out. "Sunny, beautiful District 13."
I sigh. The morphling dose still is a lovely, soft little pillow, suffocating my anxiety. "I would love to see the sun," I say. "When will it stop raining?"
"What do you remember?" asks Prim, waving away Dr. Molina, who is sauntering over to take her place by my bedside.
I blink as competing storylines come to me. I can hear her voice saying two things at once and I can't tell - I can't - which one is real. Only one thing, maybe, will prove which story is real. I clutch Prim's arm. "Did she survive? Lady - the goat. Did she survive?"
Prim looks at me, confused - a little sad. "No, Peeta," she says. "When -."
But I fall back down hard on my pillows, squeezing my eyes tight.
"OK," says Dr. Molina. "Let's give him some space, here, and bring his dinner. That doesn't - seem to have worked quite as we hoped, but maybe with a little more time to process, we'll see a change."
Someone is screaming in the background - screaming. But I ignore it. It is bleeding over from something else, somewhere else, sometime else. I'm alone in the wide open of a place that used to be a prison, but which has been blasted open. The fences flattened. The guards gone.
It is all broken and dissolved - buildings, bodies. The remains of a single tree - dead but still standing. The layer of ashes that covers the lumps in the earth is like a shroud over the corpse. I could have been spared this. Had the cannon ever sounded for me - as it should have - I could have been spared this.
The sky is gray, nearly colorless, though in the seam between two dark clouds there is a bright silver streak - the sun that hides behind the incoming storm. For a moment, staring at the light, I wonder if I'm going to slip into further levels of unreality.
Your venom levels are minute.
What a laugh. District 13 - hard to tell what was incompetence - what were outright lies. At a certain point, the chemical structure of your brain is irrevocably altered. There are some things you can't unlearn. There are some things you can't relearn.
I bend down on one knee and take the dust in my hand. I have relived this dream so often, it has a ritualistic quality now. As I press my fist to my mouth, the flashes come - the quick cuts of the lightning, followed immediately by the grumble of the thunder. The storm is just overhead. But my face is already wet. Water drops all around me.
I kiss my fingers - 1, 2, 3, 4.
Deep in the meadow, under the willow.
A bed of grass, a soft green pillow.
Lay down your head, and close your eyes,
And when you wake up …
Annie's screams rouse me from sleep and I rub my eyes.
This is the morning ritual. I watch, blearily, while she is dragged from the room, between two Peacekeepers who absolutely dwarf her. The dread in her screams lights up a reciprocal dread within me, but I've learned by now to preserve my energy. Outrage on her behalf does nothing but leave me more exhausted and vulnerable.
Anyway, she'll be back in forty-five minutes. Quieter. Perhaps damaged in some way - or perhaps they are just taping messages for Finnick Odair, wherever he is. But still alive. This is the only victory, right now - to still be alive at the end of the day.
After she comes back - and then Johanna gets up, restless and anxious, and mutters to herself, pacing in her cell - we have a couple of hours of quiet reflection until lunch arrives. This is one of the highlights of the day, and not just because it is now our only meal. It's a bit of an adventure. We are now getting leftovers from somewhere. Maybe the President's mansion, even, who knows? It's good food - sweet curried chicken with rice, honied lamb and tiny little potatoes, beef steak. The problem is, sometimes the food is quite old. And sometimes you can tell, but have to risk it anyway. A couple of days ago, I got violently ill off of some creamy soup, and I've scraped mold off of bread more than once.
But again - I need energy. Every ounce of it. From wherever it comes.
"Peeta!" Johanna says suddenly, in the weary urgency I've become used to now. She frets too much about what I say to our captors. I've tried to explain that they don't ask me much. They tell me things.
That Katniss has betrayed me. That she betrayed the rebellion. That she tried to kill me. It's an odd way to try to persuade me to cooperate.
"Yeah?"
"Didn't hear much from you after they brought you back last night," she says.
"I think I went to sleep."
"What did they do? What did they ask you?"
I frown at the white-painted brick wall between me and Johanna and try not to be annoyed with her. "They didn't really ask me anything. They showed me video - from the Games."
"What?"
I try to recover the memories and am vaguely alarmed that, even though it was just maybe twenty hours ago or so, I am having a hard time recalling what happened. "They injected me with something. It felt - strange. I felt like my body was going rigid. And they played some tape from the first time I was in the arena. But it was wrong. It looked wrong - it sounded wrong. The words were wrong. Katniss told a story I think - I'm pretty sure - went a different way. I don't know, though," I add, doubt shivering in front of me, silver-misty - I can actually see it. "I was feverish then, I guess."
I shake my head, trying to remember if Prim has a goat, but for some reason, I can't.
"Peeta," says Johanna in a low voice.
"What?"
"It sounds like maybe - they're trying to brainwash you."
"Really?" I sit up suddenly, but that makes me dizzy and I clutch my head. "But - why?"
"It's - one of his favorite things to do. Use people we love - against us. Maybe it's just for his own amusement, but if he's trying to make you forget her - or plant false memories of her … no good can come of that."
Trying to keep myself from hyperventilating, I reach out and clutch the wall beside my bed. Forget Katniss? That would involve forgetting all the important things in my life. "What - do I - do?"
"Fuck if I know," she says shortly. That's how I annoy her - assuming she's an authority on imprisonment and torture. Then, after a moment, "Try to keep thinking about the memories you have of her that they don't have on tape, I guess."
On balance, that's not most of them - not by a long shot. Easily three-quarters of my interactions with her have been recorded for posterity, and that's not even counting if we were bugged - as we suspected - in our houses back home. In my panic, it's not easy to concentrate, but - even if Johanna isn't right - I find myself eager to counteract the unpleasant session from yesterday with memories of her.
Her singing in school on the first day of kindergarten … no, I told that story in the arena; it's compromised.
The bread - that would be next. Not counting years of observing her at school, but these are snippets without real emotional context. We referred to the bread in the arena, but not in any detail. But when I call up this memory, even it is painful. There's the rain, the heat of the bread against my arms. The gaunt face of the girl. And my mother's slap - the pain, the anger later, the punishment. Worth it - yes, absolutely. But connected to bad memories. Still, largely safe from the Capitol, right? I took a beating to give her the bread that kept her alive. Yes, OK.
All my next sequence of memories about her seem tied in with Gale. Catching a glimpse of them heading toward the fence. Watching them negotiate with my father for bread. Judging from the direction they were going in yesterday, with the ludicrous hints of Katniss trying to lure kisses out of a reluctant Gale, it's probably best to stay away from those - and I don't want to dwell on them, anyway.
The rooftop of the Training Center. That last night before the Games, when I tried to tell her how I felt about remaining true to myself in the arena. But there was a fight, and anyway, it's not unlikely the Capitol saw or heard that conversation, as well.
I tug at my hair. This is impossible.
"Green," she says. "What's yours?"
I almost gasp out loud - her voice, her true voice, seems to be whispering in my ear.
"Orange."
"Like Effie's hair?"
Green, I think. Orange. Green. Orange. So simple - and so easy. Green - and I see her, sitting in the grass by the train tracks, alone without any cameras or witnesses. And I sit beside her. Green.
Orange. "A bit more muted. More like … sunset."
A mantra I can say, over and over, the next time they touch me. Green. Orange. Green. Her favorite color is green. Orange. An orange dress in District 11.
Lunch comes. It's meager today. Chicken wings and a smear of mashed potatoes. I nibble the meat off of the delicate bones, and try to imagine cold groosling in a cave. My fingertips turn orange, and I remind myself. Orange. Green.
Then, after a few more hours, they come for Johanna. Johanna is laid out on the metal counters on the far wall of the room, and she's usually put where I can see her. Her struggling - her sarcastic tongue - is subdued by drugs, and she's locked down on the counter with some kind of magnetic cuffs. They ask her, again, where the rebellion's headquarters is. Who in the Quell was involved. Where they have taken the Mockingjay. Then a hose. Metal clamps. A jolt of electricity that makes her scream out. She's useless for answering now, she just screams and screams until they put her back in her cell. Then she screams some more. Everything is in this scream - rage and defiance, pain and enormous fear.
I take all the days I can remember and string them together in a row so I can count them. I think it's been about two weeks since the Quell ended.
"Gale is so good-looking, don't you think?" she asks, in a curiously frail voice.
I sit up abruptly and find myself tangled in sheets, half naked. The room is dim, windowless. There is wood paneling on the walls. There is a gentle sway. It feels … a bit like being on the train?
"What?"
She's sitting on the edge of the bed, back to me, brushing out her long brown hair. She's wearing a robe loosely over her bare shoulders and I am startled by the guilty feeling that floods me. What happened? What did I do? Did I finally just break down and force the situation? Where are we? Did I drink last night at the feast? In District 6 they had … but I always tried to stay away from alcohol … after that one time.
[Fingers drumming on my thigh, and my blood was light as white liquor and as warm and heady. Did I imagine, just for a second, her fingers trailing up and up and up? Did I imagine, just for a second, moving my mouth to meet her whispers and saying yes, yes, please make me forget?]
"Katniss?"
She half turns to me, but her hair falls over her face so I can't quite see her. "Don't you think? Oh, I know you can't help it - being crippled. But there is something so appealing in his strength and his wholeness. You can appreciate that, at least."
Her voice is thin like a long, shivery thread. There is no timbre, no depth, nothing in her voice that resonates in my head. But it won't stop, so I have no choice but to respond to it.
"But I'm so much easier for you to crack," I say.
She shrugs and starts weaving her hair into its long braid. "There is something appealing about your weakness, I have to admit." Two powerful - but contradictory - emotions strike me. I want to get up and help her put her hair back in place. (I'm practicing my knots, I will say, in lieu of the apology I owe her. Katniss will understand this.) I also want to get up and stop her, unbraid and loosen her hair. Not gently. Violently. Violently.
When I move, I'm not actually sure which impulse has won. But I'm stopped short, anyway, by my missing prosthetic. I may not understand what about this is real - what is a dream - a drug-induced trick - but I know this empty, helpless feeling.
"Where's my leg?" I demand. "Where is it? What have you done?"
She laughs. "Don't be silly. You know that is the condition of the transaction. You get me when you give up the leg. You'll get it back - later. Later."
My breath starts to hurt. Its speed is starting to increase and my chest to heave. I have to control it - to not show them - her - whomever - that they are getting to me.
"STOP!"