Chapter Seven

One day, I wake to the sound of an electric buzzing and I stir, fuzzily looking around for the source. I squint through the fifteen bars of my cell door and see they've set Johanna up on the table again. But something is horribly different this time. She's completely naked.

I clutch my stomach - the meal today was probably not good - the chicken looked a little gray around the edges - and I'm probably going to be throwing it up violently before too long. But I try to concentrate on the girl, who is staring up at the ceiling. Her usual defiant cries are silenced. Her eyes are dark with tears as they shave her head.

Dread courses through me. "Hey," I call out, as casually as I can. This is a technique I've been trying without success - to engage the Peacekeepers in some kind of conversation, to force them to talk to me like a human being. It usually makes Johanna laugh - it's a bitter laugh, but still. "Nice day today," I continue conversationally. "What day is it again?"

Johanna turns her head to glance at me. It's just for a moment, as her head is jerked back into place, roughly. But it's enough to know that she is - finally - broken. I watch them tape some wires or something to her head. Then to various points on her emaciated body, including some humiliatingly private ones.

"It's time to talk, Sawdust." This is, honestly, the best they could come up with in humiliating nicknames for her. The girl who could fell them with an axe even more easily than if they were the trees from her needle-blanketed home in the hills of District 7. "You don't want to die like this, naked and exposed in here. Not in front of a bunch of lads sworn to years of service without pussy."

"Please, no, please!" I scream.

Johanna starts to whimper and squirm, but she's trapped. Someone brings out the hose and, as they always do before they shock her, wet her down so that it will hurt that much worse.

"Johanna - please!" I beg. I can't watch this. I can't. I'm already weakening: Weeks with hardly any food. With beatings every other day. With the screams from the girls. With whatever they do to Annie - fragile, defenseless Annie - when they take her out every morning. With NO idea what is going on outside these walls - if Panem is burning with war, if the rebellion has been squashed and everyone is dead. If someone, somewhere, is treating Katniss like we're being treated.

There's a zap and an unearthly yell from the table.

"Johanna!"

"Shut up!"

Before I see what's about to happen, someone turns the hose on me, and with the power gushed up, the blast of water knocks me backward. My head hits the floor - it's not the heaviest blow I've ever received, but I'm basically a semi-permanent concussion now, and my brain swims around as I try to crawl away from the water.

Another scream. Then: "Thirteen! They went to 13! The rebellion is based in 13!"

The water stops.

"There you go," says Thread into the silence. So he's still here, not in 12. "It pays to be honest, doesn't it?"

"You knew," she hisses, some of her defiance returning.

I stagger to my feet and slither over the wet concrete to clutch the cell doors. Stare hungrily at the scene in front of me. Information - at last. Information that makes no sense. But - something, anyway.

"Don't touch me!" she screams as someone - it's not Thread - puts a finger on her stomach.

Thread slaps the offending hand away, and my knuckles go white as I watch with tension as he and the four Peacekeepers stand still, their eyes and expressions hidden behind their masks. Johanna's chest rises and falls heavily with the panic and fear and rage.

"Put her back in the cage," Thread says at last. "Not sure what the President wants to do with her now that she's squealed." He looks up from the table and, I think, right at me.

It's when they've all gone that Johanna breaks down into wild, keening sobs.

I bite down on my impulse to question her, and instead strip off my wet clothes, wring them out, and spread them out on the driest part of my bed. I glance up at the camera on the ceiling and put my middle finger up into the air. Then I retch, and stagger over to the noxious chamber pot to vomit. Then Annie starts to scream.

I climb over to my bed, put my face down on the wet mattress, and squeeze my temples, trying to make the spinning stop.

"What?" Haymitch asks, noticing me stare at him.

"What's wrong with you?" I ask him. I was brought back into my room after my morning shower to find him already waiting for me. Today, I was finally allowed to shower without being cuffed to the wall. Since Prim removed my arm shackles, I have not been restrained to the bed, anymore, either, though my door is locked and when I have visitors, I'm hooked up to the pipelines of knock-out drugs, just in case. Still, it's better than nothing. Even being able to pace around and around the white-walled room is something.

"What's wrong with me?" he huffs.

"You're - off-color," I stammer, trying not to say yellow-green, which is what he really is. He looks as sickly now as he did the day he first visited me, and - now that I'm tolerating him, at least - I'm afraid that he is genuinely ill. "And - your face is scratched up."

He puts a hand up and traces the scabby lines down his face. "That would be Kat -." He stops abruptly on her name. "When she found out we left you in the arena, she - didn't take it well."

I narrow my eyes, trying to read his mind to determine whether or not this is a lie. Then my mind is flooded with an image - the image that calls me a liar. The mutt with dark brown fur and silver eyes, her claws sharp and deadly. Jumping softly from the trees and swiping at my leg.

"Peeta?"

It's Prim's voice. She's entering - with Delly. Contrarily, the presence of these three people who are really the only ones I trust in the world right now puts me on edge. "What's going on?" I ask nervously.

The TV is being wheeled in on its cart again and I sigh at the sight of Dr. Molina following behind it.

"You people just won't give up, will you?" I say, holding out my arm resignedly. Dr. Molina inserts the tubes into the injection ports that have taken up permanent residence along the veins of my arm. "This won't work."

But they don't go back to the arena. Instead, the black screen is artfully lit up with a spark that grows into a fire, burning the blackness away until it congeals into an image of Katniss' mockingjay pin. I roll my eyes - propaganda. Even the music swelling up behind the images sounds exactly like an advertisement the Capitol would run on TV for an upcoming Hunger Games. Even the voice - Claudius Templesmith - is a Capitol voice. "Katniss Everdeen, the girl who was on fire, burns on."

They really do all believe their own hype, don't they?

Abruptly, Katniss appears on the screen. She's wearing some kind of craftily-designed black armor, but apart from that, she looks rugged and real, her face smudged, her hair falling loose from its braid. She's standing in ruins and a fire burns behind her.

"I want to tell the rebels that I'm alive. That I'm right here in District 8 …."

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"...where the Capitol has just bombed a hospital full of unarmed men, women and children. There will be no survivors."

At first, I don't hear the words she says, I just hobble up to the large screen in the theatre room, reaching out with a hand as if I could physically touch her. She is alive. Alive.

Then she vanishes from the screen - replaced by scenes of rampant destruction. A building collapses and her voice continues over the shots of people reacting in horror. "I want to tell people that if you think for one second the Capitol will treat us fairly if there's a cease-fire you're deluding yourself. Because you know who they are and what they do."

She appears again and my hands tremble as she gestures around her, to the destroyed district. Not ours, it looks nothing like District 12 - but somewhere vulnerable - lumps of concrete and fragmented steel and shattered glass, backlit by orange light. "This is what they do!" she cries to the camera, lifting her arms, as if she did have wings. "And we must fight back!"

After that, the video shows a montage of what I guess is a true battle scene. Bombs falling from hovercraft. Katniss and a group of soldiers running through streets of rubble, being blown to the ground. The camera closes in on a gash in her leg. Then cuts to her climbing a ladder to a rooftop, shooting arrows into the sky that take down actual aircraft. There's a brief shot of Gale, also shooting arrows, and that gives me pause. How is it that he joined the rebellion? I get a confused image of him being scooped up by the rogue hovercraft, taking the seat made available by my vacancy.

"President Snow says he's sending us a message? Well, I have one for him. You can torture us and bomb us and burn our districts to the ground, but do you see that? Fire is catching! And if we burn, you burn with us!" Graphics close out the video, but I've been barely paying attention since Katniss said "torture." The word rattles around in my head. By the time I'm cognizant of anything around me, she's gone and the screen is blank.

"Well," says Snow, from his seat at the back of the room. "Care to rephrase your testimony regarding Katniss Everdeen and the rebellion?"

I put a hand to my temple. My head is spinning. I don't know what to say, I don't even know how I feel. Confused. Left out. Betrayed? So soothed to have seen her, with my own eyes, no matter what the circumstances. It's been so long - longer than it's ever been - since I saw her last. I shake my head, to clear it. It's still my job to defend her, or at least her reputation. "She didn't know anything about it in the arena. I don't know what has happened since then."

"Her - cousin's - influence, perhaps. If I'm not mistaken, our intelligence had him pegged as sympathetic to the rebels."

I know that Snow knows that Gale is not her cousin. It's a taunt, and it lands more or less on target. Despite the fact that I planned it - to die in the arena and leave her free to eventually return Gale's love for her - it still hurts - again - to see it. Maybe she thinks I am dead? That could be. Still, the girl who seemed so eager to sacrifice herself for me - the girl who kissed me like she did on that one night - seems to have moved on quickly, and in spectacular fashion.

Perspective, I think to myself, desperately. That was a prepared piece, encapsulating a small moment in time. The fact is - this is what she wanted - a rebellion - and what I wanted for her - for someone to remove her from the reach of the Capitol. So, what's my problem?

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.

.

When I blink, I'm back in 13. Everyone's looking at me for a response, but I'm just trying to get my bearings. Is it willful or accidental that this is making me substantially worse? I don't want to flash back to the Capitol - these things I forgot do not need to be remembered. But the morphling that floods my system every time they show me a tape seems to dismantle the walls between the past and present, so that I float in confusion among the fragments of my memories. Nothing but confusion can ultimately come from this.

"I saw that before," I say, at last.

"You remember?" asks Dr. Molina.

I lick my lips. "Some."

"Is it any different from how you remember?"

"Not really. No."

Molina starts writing a bunch of stuff down on his clipboard. I have a sudden, unaccountable memory of Effie, furiously writing and striking things out on a clipboard. And Katniss' anger.

"No one cares, Effie!"

Green. Orange. Green. Orange.

Suddenly my mind is taking off on its own, and the words click - I can see them, like beads of alternating colors, clacking together as I string them. Green. Orange. Green. Orange.

I wiggle around, trying to remember.

"Peeta?" someone asks - whoever it is, the voice is sexless, drained of color.

I shake my head. "Wait. Wait. Something …. No, it's going. I can't-." I close my eyes tightly on the image, willing it to stay, but the color bleeds away and the moment is gone.

I feel slightly nauseous as District 13 fades in around me. I look at the four faces that surround my bed - wait until their features clarify and they become familiar again.

"What did you remember, Peeta?" asks Delly, breathlessly.

I swallow. "Nothing - really. Colors - I - it seemed like it might be important, but I don't know why." I stare at my arms, thin, weak and ugly with needle tracks and scars, especially the long, grizzly scar from when they finally removed my arena tracker.

I'm tired of not feeling like myself - whoever that happens to be. And I'm sick of their insistence in concentrating on Katniss, as if restoring my old feelings for her - the ones that got me into trouble in the first place - is the only thing that needs to be fixed. I wish they'd at least be honest with me and admit that all this isn't really to help me. It's to make sure I don't try to kill her again.

And not only that. If I understand how these people work - and I think I do, there seems to be very little difference between them and my last captors - they want to use it again: that sick, twisted relationship that inflamed everyone in the first place. To make me admit on camera, again, my feelings for her - infinite, boundless - fruitless, barren.

That will never, never happen again.

"OK, this is good," says Dr. Molina. "We'll talk about that later, see if we can stimulate any memories. But now - we can move forward in time - I think this would have been made almost immediately after Miss Everdeen's propo."

I sigh audibly, and out of the corner of my eye, I can see Haymitch smile wryly to himself. Delly looks concerned. Prim looks calm and unflappable. "Wait," I say. "Just a second. Where's Effie? Is Effie OK?"

All eyes turn to Haymitch, and I follow them, to see his mouth drop into a frown. "Did you see her at all there - that you remember?"

I shake my head. "No."

"We're not sure. Word is she was imprisoned, but we don't know."

Gloomily sorry for asking, I follow up with, "How's Johanna doing? Annie? Are they OK?"

"Not bad. Finnick's used to handling Annie's - moods. Johanna's in treatment, as well."

"Does she remember what they did to her?"

Molina nods. "She seems to."

I wait for elaboration on this point, but get nothing; I suppose it's none of my business. But Johanna's torture is burned into my brain, clearer than almost anything else, my own torture included. I kind of need newer memories of her to replace those.

"Is - Gale also in District 2?"

This brings raised eyebrows. "No, he's here."

Gale is a puzzle to me. The sound of his name, even on my own tongue, causes a quick frisson of anger - but it fizzles out. I think I might feel sorry for him, but I'm not sure why. It seems like he went open-eyed into Katniss' snares, but he was never prey enough to keep her attention off of me.

"Any other questions?"

"I guess not." And the TV flickers back on.

Once again, I'm looking at myself, sitting across from Caesar Flickerman. We're sitting in a large, ornate room - fancy chairs, everywhere - fountains and trees. It rings a bell. My imagination peoples it with well-dressed Capitolites, tables bursting with food. But in this instance, there just seems to be me and Caesar, facing each other across a coffee table. In contrast to my previous interview, I seem gaunt and anxious.

I'm again wearing a fancy suit - it's a darker white, maybe a light beige. My curls frame my face, falling down to almost conceal my eyes. I can only really see my eyes when I tilt my head up, and they seem troubled and somehow paler than they are supposed to be.

In a grotesque parody of reality, Caesar asks me a few light questions about how I'm enjoying my extended stay in the Capitol, if I've discovered any new favorite dishes. He assures the audience that soon - soon - once all the misinformation has been cleared up and paperwork completed - I'll be free to return to District 12. Bureaucracy, right?

"Now, on to a more delicate matter," says Caesar, and I detect the strain in his voice. I feel - strangely enough - incredibly sorry for the man. For years - and I mean years - he had the best job in the Capitol: the smiling, friendly face of the ratings bonanza that was the Hunger Games. And it's all gone to hell. "There are some rumors that Katniss Everdeen is taping propaganda messages for the rebellion in the districts. How do you feel about that? You know her, after all, better than anyone. Does this ring true?"

I test my memories - but come up blank. Caesar's words ring no bells, my response is not predictable. "They're using her, obviously. To whip up the rebels. I doubt she even really knows what's going on in the war. What's at stake."

"Is there anything you'd like to tell her?"

"There is." The boy on the screen twitches a little before looking right into the camera, nervously brushing his hair out of his face. Uncovered, his eyes conceal nothing - I see them there, the beatings, the shocks, all of the indignities. "Don't be a fool, Katniss. Think for yourself. They've turned you into a weapon that could be instrumental in the destruction of humanity. If you've got any real influence, use it to put the brakes on this thing. Use it to stop the war before it's too late. Ask yourself, do you really trust the people you're working with? Do you really know what's going on? And if you don't … find out."

And that's it. I'm almost diabolically pleased to have cast doubts on District 13, sight unseen, because I really do hate this place - nor do I trust anyone here who did not first come from District 12. Apart from that, I have no mental associations with the interview. The only detail that has captured my attention is the state of my hair. It's not up to Calla's usual standards, which was to spray it stiffly away from my face so I wouldn't have to worry about it while on stage.

I try to call up some memory of Portia and my prep team in relationship to this tape, but nothing seems to come. Saying good-bye to Portia before the previous interview is the last thing I can remember of her.

"Nothing?" asks Prim, looking at me as if she can read the struggle in my mind.

"No, nothing at all," I say.

"Is it possible that they drugged him before the interview?" asks Delly. "He seemed - off."

I meet Dr. Molina's eyes. They are pale gray - a little tired looking. "Perhaps," he says. "Thank you, Mr. Mellark. We've got some avenues to start down. You should get some rest today. I think that we'll try this again tomorrow, Miss Everdeen," he adds, looking down at Prim. "Before we go back to any arena tapes. The last two propos - we'll see if there's a similar response."

"Looking forward to it," I say sarcastically to his retreating back.

Haymitch chuckles and I'm beginning to think that I might actually like him. That's a dangerous road to go down, though, considering his alliance with Katniss.

… Katniss, whose motives I can't quite understand. Everything I've seen, everything I can remember now seems to disagree with the singular thought in my head, the one that insists she is a Capitol mutt. So - why did she hurt me so much? It doesn't make any sense.

"You loved her."

Flashes go off in my eyes.

I blink at the rows of cameras. For what seems like forever, I'm stuck behind the microphone, trying to remember where I am and what I'm supposed to be saying.

"Not everything was true," I admit to the crowd of onlookers. "But …."

"You loved her."

I close my eyes on the flickering, swaying light bulb. What is the point to this? What is the point? Everyone knows. I laid out everything inside me and more for public consumption. And they were hungry for it ….

"Mr. Mellark."

The cold push of fluid in my veins. The rush of it - silver-bright behind my eyelids. I can see it - descending on me like a poisonous mist. I start to shiver. When I try to hold my body still, the shivers become spastic and my limbs jerk. Where it comes from - the fear - the sharp, potent anxiety - the slow, creeping paranoia - where it comes from is only inside of me, but the knowing is not enough.

"I loved her."

"A mutt."

"Sure - yeah - a mutt," I respond. Green. Green. Green.

"She didn't love you in return."

I open my eyes. And now, as they've done before, the withdrawal. Fear recedes. But it leaves some residue behind. "I - don't - I -."

"She isn't capable. She was bred for betrayal. She was not built for love."

Two choices here: to agree or to accept the drugs. Very straightforward. Very matter-of-fact. To preserve your life in the arena, you have to hurt other people. In small ways as well as in large ones. In small ways as well as in … you have to kill a part of yourself in order to do it.

(To give myself, finally, to death.)

"But - she did. She did."