Chapter Eight

"So I understand you refuse to make a statement on the war," Thread says.

I put my head down and hunch myself into a ball on the bed. I don't care what happens now, just that I will no longer cooperate. Not after the last time - not after - whatever it was … I can't remember. Something - happened. The lights flickered and there was a loud electric pop. Something they didn't plan, and it was somehow my fault when things went wrong.

Stop!

Don't cry for the dead, someone told me. Do you know how many she killed? The girl you are attempting to protect? The mutt? Do you know she destroyed it - District 12? Do you understand this?

The cell door opens and I brace myself, clutching my knees. There's also a clatter in the next cell and Johanna starts yelling out - "He doesn't care about me, fuckers, so don't even bother!"

I could move - I could make a move and maybe it would spare her. But spare her for what? We. Are. Dead. Dead. At this point, our lives' continuation is only at their pleasure and for their sick and deranged entertainment.

"Get up, Mellark!"

"Get up!"

"Just finish it," I say. And to think - I could have flittered away, quietly and gently, on my own terms - a victim of infection, dying peacefully in the earth of the arena. The mutt - the - Katniss, no, Katniss - saved me then, but only for this in the end.

Thread laughs. "Just don't kill him, boys," he says.

Then they start hitting me - hard - on my exposed back. Within moments, I'm in the fetal position on my bed, just making weak, thin animal sounds as they pummel my back and my legs. When I make some desperate - instinctive - move to crawl away from the beatings, they hit my head and I'm out.

I wake to sheer exhaustion. There is no pain. I can look down - stiffly - to see that my arms are covered in needles again. There is a numbing effect to whatever they use to subdue me. But that just means they use even stronger drugs to induce pain.

I glance around at the weirdly stained tiles of this room - a hospital room in that section of this underground labyrinth where I first woke up, a victor, a little more than a year ago. I have a feeling that I've been here before, several times - two, three, four, five? But I'm losing my ability to form memories in this place, and I'm not sure. Only that it smells like blood in here, wires burning, sweat and screams.

The fear of death, which sustained me through the arena, even though I was prepared to die for my cause - the fear of death has left me. I feel my brain detaching much as it did when I buried myself in the earth, but this time there is no rational voice slapping me awake, making me hold on, hold on, until help came. Until she came. This time, she's not coming.

What do they want from me? There must be some purpose to my life for the Capitol, but I just can't figure it out - there sure isn't one for me. The only thing that worries me about my death is how no one will know that I'm gone. They'll wonder - hope for a while, maybe, eventually assume the worst. I'll die anonymously, underground, having achieved nothing, really, except for being abandoned by Haymitch and the rebellion.

My eyes cross, and I start, my heart jumping dangerously. Katniss? There's a girl in the room with me, wearing a dark jacket, and her dark brown braid falls down her back. She's facing the wall and I can't see her face. My mouth makes a sound, but I can't even form the word.

There's a whir as the machines start up and, all at once, two of the tubes swell and the liquid flows into me, but now I'm struggling against the stupor of my mind, trying to understand if I'm seeing her, or an illusion again. Of what would it mean for her to be here.

The room goes black, and then one of the walls lights up with projected images, scattering the shadow of the girl with the braid across all the walls and corners of the room.

"We're on the same team, now, you know," her voice echoes in the darkness.

"So I heard. Nice of you to find what's left of me."

I stare at the projection; maybe it's the quality of the projector, but there's something strange about the images, they seem blurry around the edges, and washed out - or maybe it's my dizzy eyes.

I feel the tubes expand, and this time I know for sure that they are pushing some sort of hallucinogenic through me - it feels so strange and sideways, so shiny, just like the tracker jacker venom. And the images on the screen start to dissociate themselves from each other, shattering into a dizzying montage that, in its fragmented way, tells its own story. Katniss glaring at me from the high branches of a tree. The bursting nest of tracker jackers. An arrow just missing me and hitting a tree instead, and her face, livid with anger and distrust. Katniss, whistling four notes into the air, notes that dissolve into screams. Shooting her arrow. Two dead tributes are at her feet.

"We call them nightlock."

Her face, gray, skeletal - a little distorted, holding out a handful of poisonous berries to me.

Her eyes, wide and wild, while she clamps her hand over my nose and throat, and I choke on the poison she fed me.

The evening sun glimmers off the surface of the lake and she whistles again - the same four notes - and this time, the mutts come at me. I see them snapping at my feet while she runs confidently ahead of them. I feel the bite on my leg.

I hear the sound of a strange, mocking laughter.

Then a burst of sunlight pierces the room as two figures approach the fence-line of District 12. They stand there for a moment - Katniss and Gale - talking, and then he kisses her.

At this point, the images in my own head take over; the mutt version of Katniss that sprang to life on the train ride home somehow merging with this new image of her. Deceitful and manipulative. Dangerous.

I feel a hand on mine, and the delicate end of the braid brushes across my face. I try to look at her - quivering as if she was a raindrop about to fall from a blade of grass and dissolve forever. Sparkly, as if she was a creation of Cinna's, a trick of the light. Her face isn't right - too round. Her eyes aren't right, either. But nothing I am seeing is right. She puts a needle into the delicate veins of my left hand and plunges it.

"What are you -?" And then a fire flows into my blood, spreads up my arms and shoots through my body, lighting up my nerves from the inside. Pain so intense my body lifts up with the sudden rigidity of all my muscles. And I scream, but screaming makes everything hurt even more.

She grabs my head and forces me to look toward the projections on the wall. My eyelids are glued open, so the flickering pictures are forced onto my retinas. It's a swirling recap of the second arena, but now the pictures are melting in a terrifying manner. The moon drips into the lake and ignites it, and my eyes burn.

She keeps trying to get close to me - the girl in the arena - and all I can feel is fear. Grabbing my hand, leaning into me, kissing me. Then she splits into her two forms - the wolf rising, tearing into the braided girl who is poised over me, holding her needle. Her blood splatters the walls all around me - sparkly, silver sprays of blood. And I scream and scream.

I kneel on the ground, my hand stretched out. 1. 2. 3. I know I am tempting fate. But, fuck it - come at me. Come at me.

I watch the mottled patterns of the trees cast their shadow on my skin - like the ghost of an attempt at camouflage. I listen to the sound - the light gait, the rustle of the dried grass, as it navigates the trees.

Its approach is tentative - the movement stops and I can only just see the shape of it, crouching in the grass while it deliberates. What is the mutt? Well - I've always thought I'd known it to be one thing - one person. I guess I'm about to find out.

As it approaches me, I keep my hand out - though I almost drop it in my surprise. It's smaller than my memories have made it - and a little less dark. As it approaches, snuffing and whining, as if afraid of me - but curious and drawn to me - I see that its fur is not quite brown. It's mottled - whites and blues and browns all mixed together. It's shaggy. shabby, and a little gaunt. Hungry.

Perhaps a warning should be going off in my head, but I feel myself to be perfectly safe. It stops several feet away from me, just sniffing and snuffling the ground. Then it looks up at me, and I am startled by its eyes.

My face is tilted up towards the light by two dark and delicate fingers and I feel the hot drops of water fall on my cheeks, one, two. The fingers quickly move to wipe the tears from my face and I smell a sweet, evening-flower scent, and a low voice whispers, "I'm sorry."

I hold myself still, in a routine so familiar now that I don't have to be told what to do, just follow the gentle directions of her fingers. I feel the stinging first layer of thin liquid, worked gently into my cheeks. Then the slick lotion, finger-painted over my face. Then the scented powder, the musky fine dust motes billowing around me.

Then soft, moist fingers smooth through my hair, and I feel her flattening out my curls, and then twisting them back in again.

I open my eyes in the pause and she swims in front of them, familiar but strange. Her large brown eyes glitter with her tears. She leans over me with a small brush and paints my lips. I blink at myself in the mirror behind her, and it's only by the reciprocal motions in the mirror - the eyelids fluttering, the twitch of the mouth - that I know that the person there is me. My pale face - death-white-blue under the powder - looks ghostly over the black suit I am wearing.

"One last thing." She lifts my left wrist and slips on a thin gold bracelet. It sparkles with the glint of some orange gem placed dead center. A word rattles around my empty brain. Orange. Orange. Orange.

"What do I do again?"

Her lips come in close to my ear. "Just read the words on the screen. And - Peeta..." Then a flood of words in my ear, barely distinguishable, a number here and there.

I'm helped to my feet and then she grabs my hand and holds it, tight, even as rougher hands pull me away from her by the shoulders. Out into another space. Cameras - again. A podium. Plush chairs, carpets, gold inlay in the woodwork. Marble. Heavy, brocade curtains. I'm helped up to a chair with a high seat, my feet on a metal rung. Pointed toward a monitor, on which I can see myself, looking confused and worried.

"When the words come on the screen, you read them. Understand?"

I nod.

District 12 is gone. The Capitol destroyed it, as soon as the Quell ended.

I look around in confusion for the source of the whispered words. But they are inside my head. I slump down, disappointed.

"3, 2, 1 …"

A slow, slithering voice starts up on my right hand side, but I continue to stare straight ahead, waiting for the words. My image has been replaced by that of President Snow, standing at the podium, smilingly benevolent. "Greetings, citizens of Panem. Tonight, I come to you with another update on the state of the uprisings by the districts. Once again, I want to assure you, we will be victorious in this fight, as we were before. In the meanwhile, here are some important updates, which will explain the recent shortages."

The rebels have taken her to District 13.

Now I'm back on the monitor and the words start blinking at me. "There must be a cease fire," I read out loud. "The damage - the damage done to the infrastructure hurts you in the districts, just as much as the Capitol." The monitor shows an electronic map behind me, and I see - for the first time - the shape and layout of the country of Panem. I am almost mesmerized as the screen zooms in and the map lights up, intercut with videos - a dam buckling after an explosion. A derailed train. Fires. And with each video, a new scroll of words. The rebels blew up …. The rebels destroyed the tracks …. It's strange to be reading these words, as if I know what I'm talking about, just as I am seeing these things for the first time myself.

And then the words abruptly disappear. I see instead the wreckage of stone buildings - great broken boulders of stone and marble, piles of brick. There are no landmarks, but nonetheless it is strangely familiar to me - maybe it's the burnt, ashy remains of a small tree, the skeleton of which has a recognizable shape. There's a girl with a braid, back to the camera, standing in the rubble, surveying it. She hops from one broken stone to another, and finally turns around. Her face, this time, is the right one.

And if the whispers were right about District 12, what else were they right about?

Suddenly, I see myself again, my own puzzled face. The words are back on the screen, and I open my mouth - "The rebels bombed a water purification plant in District …"

Then I stop again. There's another face on the screen. Whole and healthy, but sad. I vaguely recognize the young man, but not enough to put a name to the face. "... when she died, Rue was only …"

There are angry voices rising all around me, but what can I do? There are no more words to read. It's become a montage every bit as disconnected and confusing as the ones they show me when I'm strapped to the table. I frown down at my lap, and the orange glint from my bracelet distracts me. Orange. Orange. Orange.

Green.

My head shifts sideways. Orange. Green. Orange. Green.

They're going to attack District 13 tonight.

"We're back! We got it back! They're gone!" someone says.

I stare at the monitor, but there's only Snow, caught off guard, staring off to the side. He jumps a little when he hears the voice and turns again to face the camera. "Clearly, the rebels are now attempting to disrupt the dissemination of information they find incriminating, but both truth and justice will reign. The full broadcast will resume when security has been reinstated. Mr. Mellark, given tonight's demonstration, do you have any parting thoughts for Katniss Everdeen?"

Parting thoughts. The sound of her name is like a small jolt of adrenaline. It is the echo of memories that used to fill my head. Parting thoughts. A girl, crouched and dying, under the bare-branched apple tree in a long ago winter.

They'll destroy it like they did District 12.

"Katniss," I rasp. I'm staring only at myself, but I can almost see the silver eyes. "How do you think this will end? What will be left? No one is safe." I can feel my breath growing short. I know that this will bring punishment. But, as I did long ago, understanding that my actions would bring my mother's hand down on me, I plow on, desperately, almost without a choice. "Not in the Capitol. Not in the districts. And you … in 13 … dead by morning!"

"End it!" shouts Snow.

A still image of Katniss fills the monitor and, for a moment, I can see my eyes reflected behind hers, and then a blow to my head. And then a second. And then darkness.