Chapter Sixteen

Boom.

The cannon. Someone else has died.

I wake up, after a few hours of sleep, to the sound of explosions. At first I think the boom has rattled awake my latent concussions, and I touch my temple. But the rattling stops and Boggs shouts out to the startled unit, "It's OK, that's ours - about three miles north."

Finnick goes with me to breakfast - he and Homes are in charge of me this morning. He whistles on his way back to camp and, after eating, produces a pencil and paper from somewhere and spends a lot of time writing something out, before folding it up and putting it in his jacket. It's now that I remember that he is newly married and I think about Annie. That rattles my head again.

"No questions for me?" he asks me.

"I want to remember the Quell," I say softly, trying not to look over at the other side of the camp, where Katniss and Gale are eating together.

"Ask away."

"What happened before you and Beetee wired the tree?" I ask.

"You tell me," he says keenly.

"We must have - walked up from the beach," I say, slowly. "It was so hot. And heavy. I was full, like I had eaten too much."

Finnick nods.

"We had seafood and bread. Did you show us - how to fish?"

"Yes. Do you remember - the bubbles in the sand?"

I twitch back, pushing away the memory. Bubbling sand … that's how it starts. Was that real? "No," I choke. "There were monsters in the sand. Real or not real?"

"Not real," says Finnick with a frown. "What do you mean by monsters?"

I shake my head. "They come out of the sand - shiny, slimy - tentacles and eyes."

"Whoa - whoa," says Finnick, his eyes widening as I start to shake. "Not real, Peeta. Come on, dude, stay with me. Where's the rope?"

I pull it out from where it has become buried in my bag. At first I just pull at it, from either end, unable to do anything as complex as fold it together. I stand up suddenly, and both Finnick and Homes jump up. But I hold out my hands. "It's OK. It's OK. I just need to use the bathroom." I shove the rope back at Finnick and duck out of the tent grid, knowing I'll be followed, but just needing to get away.

Get away. I probably should get away. What the fuck am I doing here, standing on the edge of the Capitol, filming propaganda for 13?

In the train station bathroom, which is now always full of the rag-tag soldiers of camp, I go into the bathroom stall, puke up breakfast, then splash water all over my face at the sink, stare closely at myself in the mirror. My hollow cheeks under the points of my cheekbones. The dark circles under my eyes. My dull stare - nothing behind them. My personality - gone.

I stare down at my balled-up fist. I've just stopped myself from punching the glass. That would hurt. That would alarm all these people around you. That would get you sent back to the one place you like even less than this one.

Outside the restroom, I run straight into Finnick and Homes. Homes grabs my arm with a tight grip and I tense, but do not fight him.

"Feeling better?" asks Finnick.

"Yeah."

Back at camp, both of them are very casual, acting like there's nothing going on. "Bathroom," Homes answers simply in response to Boggs. I find a big plastic box of medical supplies to sit on, and stare right into space. My thoughts aren't racing. They are floating, in slow circles, somewhere up above me. I have to get out of here, I think again.

Facing lunch, and four hours talking to Gale, I start to make contingency plans. I'll eat lunch, then I'll ask Boggs if I can call Haymitch. After that, whether or not I can make the call, I'll take all my pill bottles, empty them out, and put them all back, pill by pill. Gale will be relieved of another conversation recreating a dead town - and probably relieved to see the person he considers his chief rival showing signs that he is not sane, will never again be sane.

But after lunch, Boggs calls us around. We have a mission. He pulls out some kind of device which, when turned on, displays a projection of a map, and he points to a spot. "We're headed here. Fourteen blocks. There's an intersection with active pods that has been left for us to disable. Squad 609 went through there yesterday, but headed east and left the intersection untouched. This pod here," he points to a dot on the map, "has an automatic machine gun nest. This one unleashes a net. Not much, but they want to move heavy troops through that route, so - at least we'll be clearing something useful."

Everyone around me groans. We are then ordered into our heavy gear, which includes bullet proof vests.

I wait around with the camera crew, with whom I've done next to no interacting. They are not assigned to watch me and I wonder if everyone worries that Capitolites might trigger some flashbacks. Right now, though, everything is a potential trigger. I watch the cameramen put on their portable cameras over their gear, and realize that I never hear them talk to each other - but they seem to communicate with gestures and looks. Brothers, Mitchell told me.

Boggs comes by, carrying my gun, and at first I start to shake my head, to refuse it, but he says, "It's loaded with blanks, soldier. It's just for show."

I shrug. "I'm not much of a shot, anyway." I frown as Pollux, one of the cameramen, makes a small sound, with his mouth closed, as he tests the settings on his camera or something. His brother is eyeing me in suspicion, but there's a dangerous buzzing in my head, and I feel almost like I have tunnel vision, the edges of my eyesight starting to get fuzzy. "You're an Avox, aren't you?" I say to Pollux. But I've figured it out for myself, and continue on. "I can tell by the way you swallow. There were two Avoxes with me in prison." And as I say the words, I'm there - in the room with the big screen and the darkness, and the girl - she's holding a something with a red light on it, but it's not pointed at me. "Darius and Lavinia, but the guards mostly called them the redheads." I vaguely am aware that I sound like I'm strapped to my bed, talking to Dr. Molina in a dispassionate, cold voice about the things so horrible that I can't bear to think about them. "They'd been our servants in the Training Center, so they arrested them, too. I watched them - being tortured to death."

I am strapped down - and my eyes are wedged open, so I can't close them on this horror. The girl, stripped down to her underwear, with wires sprouting out of her body. The jolt makes her whole body lift in the air, and when she comes down with a shudder, she can't even scream - just make a death-rattle sound in her throat. And then it stops….

"Stop!"

The first one hundred times I screamed it, I was begging. When they killed Lavinia - when the lights flickered and popped and her gargled screams abruptly ended - there was a strange silence. It sulked around the room, remonstration and guilt. They didn't mean for her to die, yet - so, strangely, in that moment, we were all murderers. Even if they meant to kill her eventually. And somehow - I was responsible - me, strapped to the table and sweating and pleading. Not the people in white coats. Not the people in white uniforms. Playing too rough with their toys. Me. And I felt it, too. Because her torment was solely for my benefit. It was my fault.

"Stop!"

Someone got the idea to stop playing with electricity, and instead to bring out the blades. And now Darius is in pieces - I do, I see him - literally in pieces. There are no drugs - not even the ones that keep me from struggling against my restraints. There are no drugs - as if this, above all things, they want me to remember for real. Blood pooling everywhere. The sickening sound of a hand - dismembered, dropping to the tiled floor. The strangled cries of the helpless man. He's dead. There is no doubt. But this time, they are doing it on their own timeline.

Because they wanted it - and because I wanted Darius to know that I do not endorse this - I begged for them to stop. Begged. Promised them - anything. But then, after two nights - after waking up on the third day - in this room with the blood and the pieces of his body on the fucking floor - they brought her in.

And then it became a command. "Stop! Stop! Stop!"

And she looks anxious and hesitant - scared shitless. I know she isn't Katniss. I know she isn't. I didn't actually think that she was real. She slept with me and stuck me with needles and made me watch nightmarish videos and whispered things I wanted to hear and dreaded to hear - so she couldn't be real.

I know she isn't Katniss.

But in this playlet they have created, I have no other name for her. And now they have given her the surgical saw and are almost pushing her to the body on the table on the other side of the room.

"Cut off his leg. Left leg, below the knee."

"Stop!" I forbid this to happen. I forbid it.

She glances back at me, and there is only a fixed mask of terror. But her eyes are wide, and I see the white of them. She wouldn't do it, I think. Nothing could compel her to do it.

...The buzzing sound is still in my ears as the images fade.

"It took days to finish him off."

And now I'm not sure who I am talking to. I could be standing in the vacant places of my head, for all I can tell, just me and the Avox, in bloody pieces. "They kept asking him questions, but he couldn't speak, he just made these horrible animal sounds. They didn't want information, you know? They wanted me to see it."

Pollux suddenly comes back into focus right in front of me, and I jump back. I know he can't answer, so I look to his brother, then Finnick, then Katniss. "Real or not real?" I ask her. If she was there with me, I think dizzily, she could assure me - it all didn't really happen. But she's just - they're all just - staring at me as if I was speaking nonsense. "Real or not real?!"

"Real." This from Boggs. "At least, to the best of my knowledge. Real."

My body tingles strangely, as if I've just come out of a nightmare. But I know - I know - this is real, something repressed, not imagined, because I could never imagine something like this. "I thought so. There was nothing - shiny about it." Needing to get away from Pollux, I just wander over to the opposite side of the camp.

At this moment, it's possible that if my gun was not loaded with blanks, and if I knew how to use it, I would kill myself now. I have every sympathy possible for Johanna and her need to forget, and the knowledge that it is not possible for the living brain to forget something like this, no matter how hard it tries. I rub my fingers together, and the touch of my own skin is loathsome to me. Who am I to be alive when so many people have died in my place? I close my eyes and I see her again - the mutt. As always, desire and dread of her exist in equal measure, and I'm almost manically happy to see her again - that 13 did not destroy her. I hold out my hand, knowing that it is dangerous, that nine times out of ten she will claw at my leg until it hurts, again. Oh, but the tenth time ….

You have a weakness for beautiful things and I don't.

Crunch, crunch. I'm walking, and I don't remember when I started, and it makes me afraid. The ground is covered with shiny shards of glass, glittering in the overhead sun. I'm supposed to tell Boggs something, but I'm not sure what, exactly. I need to stop and have some time to sort myself out and figure out where I am and what's going on.

Boom. Boom. It's the sound of the cannon. Someone has died. I'm yanked down to the ground by someone and the rattle of the guns makes my head ring. Then silence, then the sound of laughter.

"Let's do it again! We need some close-ups!"

I just stay down, chin resting on my gun, the shards of glass cutting into my palms.

"Pull it together, 4-5-1," says Boggs, with a high-pitched laugh in his voice, rising like the whistle on a tea pot. The sound expands and echoes out until it reaches its outer limits, and explodes, and blood rains down on us.

I jump to my feet and try to make my eyes focus. There is smoke everywhere, white on gray. Then another explosion and I'm knocked backward and hit my head.

After a blacked-out second - just long enough to put an eraser to the past few days, weeks, maybe months - I jump to my feet, looking for the attackers.

"Prepare to retreat!" yells someone in my ear. The air smells suddenly like warm death, and I'm pushed forward. Gunfire erupts all around me. Then I see it - the bloodied man, screaming out in agony, being hauled away by the mutt - his legs chewed off. Something I didn't finish, and more people are dying again, because I could never quite finish what I started …. I sprint toward her, and clasp her with my fingers, and just - hold on - and yank her back. ...