Landing Zone Three was once a golf course. Atop a rocky ledge, a mountain to the north, a ninety - foot escarpment to the south that overlooked the Presidential Palace, its eighteen holes once stretched from west to east. Some holes grew larger in the fighting. Two notable shell craters and bits of a Buffalo loaded with bombs that had blown up, surrounded the remains of a gazebo where antebellum Capitolians were once served drinks by Avoxes, as they paused from their efforts to play the tenth hole. Command chose it for a base near the Snow regime's former digs, with no tunnels beneath, and the Seventh Engineers, commanded by my old student Jacob Talbot, had moved the bigger chunks of scrap aside, filled some craters, and opened a runway that allowed our hoverplanes to get airborne with heavier loads. I wasn't here to see Jacob, as his written report on the mutt find was brief but thorough. I was meeting his dad, Levias.

Commander Levias Talbot was an old schoolmate in Thirteen. We'd both been in love with Portia Black, now a noted biophysicist and a clinician in orthopedics. Portia married him. She was the smartest person I ever knew. A bookworm warrior like Lt Jackson and every damn bit as maddeningly mysterious. Levias was second to our intelligence chief, then General Paylor snatched him up, immediately after President Coin promoted her past all of us colonels and made her a general to rival Plutarch's favorite, Army Chief of Staff General Cassius Gray. Command sent me here with half a puzzle and I hoped Levias had a few more of the missing pieces.

I was seated in what had been the clubhouse bar room, which was now a self-service buffet for the officers and clerks. Two elderly avoxes re-stocked the food from out of the mobile kitchen that General Paylor had improvised, and also cleaned the place for us. They kept doing their old jobs because they had nowhere to go. The Army could feed and house them but couldn't pay them. Hell, the Army couldn't pay anybody. Most folks from Thirteen were just learning about money. We didn't use it at home.

Everything in Thirteen was rationed. If it was someone's turn to scrub dishes in the kitchen or tend cows in one of our underground farms, they did their duty or got a kick in the ass for goofing off. We all longed for the day we'd free ourselves and move above ground. I even used that longing, to motivate my students when I taught survival. The liberty to choose what to cook and how much to eat, and when to fall asleep, was exhilarating. The more spoiled they got by the thought of actual freedom to choose, the sooner they wanted to get this war won and live freely.

This clubhouse was now Paylor's headquarters. Paylor was well-liked in the districts she had liberated, because she did her best to understand the local micro-economies and minimize the damage done to them. It might be a black market stall to a Peacekeeper, but for some vendor and their customers in the district, it meant survival. She refused to send away any Capitol citizen who would work for food, just as she had done for the citizens of District Eight, and when cracking The Nut in District Two. Many of those starved survivors whom she fed, got strong enough to march with her and they enlisted. With Snow in custody, we didn't want more troops at the moment, but she was setting a fine example of what public service actually is, and that made me proud to be a part of it.

I was nibbling on some celery and eying the turkey sandwich I'd made, when Captain Hawthorne got my attention.

"Colonel, the General wants to hold this meeting in her office, and she said to bring your sandwich. "

I followed him, my cap off and stuffed through my belt. This sounded bad. Paylor had just taken over my operation, I guessed.

"Gale, Mike, have a seat!". Paylor's voice was both commanding and inviting. Her cap was rolled up and stuffed under her left epaulet. Square-jawed, square-shouldered with a compact rack, short legs and a powerful ass, she resembled either a main battle tank or a gnome-like mining pony of ancient times, except for the lively green eyes framed by close-cut raven hair. Eyes that flashed intelligently with wordless recognition. She wasn't big on salutes, except when someone was too dumb to realize they'd screwed up, in which case she would stand the dummy at attention and administer a reaming of the ears, that left the cocky fool quivering with indecision, after shocking said fool with her knowledge of his personal secrets. After which, fools would salute. Or stand on one foot while reciting the names of all the dead tributes of the 72nd Hunger Games. Or whatever else would halt the flow of sheer terror and get them out of Paylor's office.

"Is Portia out of the Infirmary yet?". Paylor was known for chewing people out with two sentences. She just wasted one to ask about Portia Talbot.

I kept her folksy District Ten tone. And politely waited to hear what I'd screwed up today.

"Doctor Talbot was gimping around the lab nicely when I flew here yesterday. She volunteered for the Mutt Genome project when Command announced it and we're glad to have her on it. And she got a message off to their older son at Seventh Engineers, asking for mutt organs wherever found."

"I never found out and I didn't want to pester Levias, but did they save both her legs?". This is serious, I thought. She used two sentences already, and still has not gotten to the issue.

"Her understudy, Doctor Diego, got the kneecap and joint to grow back together."

"Glad to hear it. The shitheads, I mean, Peacekeepers, killed most of her medics and all of her patients when they firebombed the hospital in Eight. She was checking a load of meds and surgery supplies on an arrived hoverplane, and one of the bombs rolled the plane on top of her and looked to have smashed her legs all to hell. I had a view of the whole scene, while Gale here and the Mockingjay were shooting arrows at the bastards. Wasn't Portia a runner once?"

"At one time, Portia could outrun me in a sprint. I hope she heals up enough for a rematch by September."

"And who do I thank for downing six enemy hovercraft that day, with arrows?"

"That would be Dr Beetee Latier, with a lot of advice on arrows from Gale Hawthorne here, and some confusion I introduced but which they ignored. Beetee made some outstanding wire out of graphene sheet, clad with copper. We snipped it in short pieces and embedded it in Xyex. When the Xyex detonates, those bits of hyperconductor short out anything electrical that they penetrate. The superconducting magnets that provide the magnetic levitation, get no power and the craft drops like a stone."

"Speaking of stones, Lieutenant Talbot isn't here, but I would like to know why it took him half a day and two thousand tons of rock excavating, when my deployment order to him, was to turn off the valve of a broken water main and RTB."

Here it comes, I thought.

"I received a copy of his report to you and it seemed clear what he'd found. "

"Mike, I like Portia and I've seen her work. She's an exceptional physician and scientist. She patched me together once and helped hundreds of my troops. But the problem the medical branch have, is they don't always follow the chain of command. And now her kid is spreading that disorder into the Engineers, because she asked him for some mutt guts."

Dummy. I didn't reply about Talbot's report, and Paylor is pissed about being circumvented and probably also thinks Command is hiding something from her. Ordering troops under her command, to go off on side missions that make them unavailable for tasks she needs done. I never intended to do that. I doubted if Portia or Levias or Jacob Talbot intended to do that. And Charlie Foxtrot, that's precisely what we made happen, without even trying. Before I could make my lips move, Paylor saw the recognition cross my face and her eyes flashed. I was getting my ear reamed out momentarily.

"I know a wee bit about medicine. I was a doctor of veterinary medicine, before the war. I reported to the Business Adminstrator in District Ten. I also was on call at the Capitol for their horses. I did a lot of flying and I served in the Underground, before I came out to Thirteen for officer's training. I know what it's like, to want to help, but make things worse by trying. Gale, would you please dim the lights? "

"Yes ma'am.", Captain Hawthorne affirmed, reaching for the light switch.

"I have some video here, that was shot by a special service unit, using a gadget you invented, Mike. It's called an Arrowplane."

I felt my face getting hot. Paylor hadn't even raised her voice.

"It was a bright bit of engineering work."

Now I was starting to perspire. A letdown was coming at the end of all this praise and I was sure it would feel awful. And then I opened my big mouth.

"Captain Hawthorne was a big help on the Arrowplane, General. He got the ultraflywheel design worked out, from his previous work with traps and snares, ma'am. "

"Yes, Mike, I'm familiar with that. Two counter-rotating flywheels spin as propellers. The craft is shot from a longbow with the flywheels spinning. You spin them up with a solar panel or the battery pack of a Buffalo before you shoot it into flight. It stores enough kinetic energy in the flywheels for a four-minute flight. It steers with the remote controls on any officer's Holo. And those counter-rotating propellers give the camera an exceptionally stable ride, even in the worst wind conditions. Gale, roll the video, please." Paylor sounded polite and mechanical, as if to rush through this talk.

The desktop Holo display flickered a blur as the Arrowplane shot from the soldier's bow and then the image came into focus. I saw snow falling, smoke, ashes, buildings. Then I recognized the Presidential Palace.

The officer who shot this video was gliding the Arrowplane in a lazy loop over the Palace, maintaining an overwatch. Some shitheads were staring over the palace walls, at the sight of all seven of our main battle tanks rolling into position, facing the north lawn.

Clearly this was Waterloo for Coriolanus Snow.

If they each fired a single 155mm round, the Presidential Palace would be rubble in less than a second. The last three rounds to detonate, would bounce the rubble around and make the pieces smaller, because nothing would be standing by then. Each tank probably had eighteen of them stowed in the turret and main deck ammunition compartments.

The shitheads on the north lawn weren't firing. They weren't surrendering. They were just gawking, as if hoping this was a nightmare from which they would awaken.

At the south lawn, shitheads were stripping off their white uniforms and putting on civilian clothes. There was a large group of civilians, many wounded, most of them children, in the street outside the south gate of the palace, behind some barricades. Shitheads were stealing clothing from the wounded to blend into the crowd, and they were escaping. A small force of infantry, probably part of a special service force, advanced stealthily on the south entrance, using the deserting shitheads as cover. Suddenly an invisible hovercraft, flying nap of the Earth, decloaked and came to a halt over the south gate. The officer commanding the advancing rebels held up a fist. The troops froze in position, perhaps expecting the craft to open fire on them. Instead, the hovercraft dropped a lot of shiny objects on parachutes, rotated, and was recloaking as it flew away to the south. A cloud of smoke and dust went up from the crowd of civilians.

When the dust cleared, there was blood and gore on the ground. Severed limbs were strewn about. The rebel infantry at the scene got disorderly and some ran toward the explosion scene. The officer was shouting something but some of the troops kept running toward the blast scene. Then a group of uniformed medics came running into the scene. Heedless of any danger, they waded right into the sea of wounded. My chest tightened as I recognized the young girl leading the charge.

Her mother and she had shared the apartment, next door to my own room in District Thirteen.

It was Primrose bleeping Everdeen, running directly into harm's way to help the wounded. My eyes started to moisten. What if a shell overshot the palace, I worried. They're too fucking close.

The officer sent someone with the chevrons of a sergeant across the street. The sergeant grabbed a lief-corporal and pointed at something. A shiny object with a parachute attached, partly camouflaged with the blood of the dead and wounded. The sergeant and the lief-corporal both began shouting and waving their arms, motioning away from the scene. Some soldiers turned and began running in retreat. I thought I could see the officer's lips moving, saying "Fall Back", as he waved furiously at the soldiers to return toward him. I began to notice shapes on the ground. Bloody parachutes and containers. Some of the silvery objects that fell from the hovercraft were still intact, maybe. The objects exploded in a bigger puff of smoke, that swallowed the sergeant, the lief-corporal, the medics, the wounded, and most of the retreating soldiers. Something shiny flew toward the camera. The picture went to cubes and the screen went blank.

My chest hurt.

I tutored wee Prim on her chemistry. She was a smart little creature, learned two years' worth of university - level chemistry classes in five months. While also pulling shifts in the Infirmary, tending to our wounded. She was almost...almost the daughter I might have had if I'd persuaded Portia to marry me. Damn. That's why I'm single?

And Portia. Whose patients got burnt alive in the firebombing of the hospital, during the Battle of Eight. She was in one hell of a shape when she was rescued. She came in with Boggsy and the Mockingjay. Boggsy's face was smashed in. Katniss Everdeen, the Mockingjay, Prim's big sister, had a six-inch hunk of sheet metal blown into the back of her thigh, between the psoas and biceps femoris muscles, and had bled something fierce, but insisted on using her bow as a crutch, hobbling into the Infirmary. "Don't let the bastards see you coming out prone", she said.

Well, Portia fucking well came out prone. When a six-ton hoverplane rolls onto a kneecap and the leg damned nearly detaches, the person isn't standing up anytime soon. That plus she got burnt, second-degree, when a firebomb ignited her pants. I remembered Portia waking up with a scream after surgery. And brave little Prim titrating Portia with morphling. Just enough morphling to take the edge off the pain, so Portia could visit with her young son David, and me. Get things in order, show Levias and Jacob she's alright, before Plutarch Heavensbee broadcasts video of her pants on fire and her legs getting crushed.

The hell was I doing in the Infirmary that day? Right. Beetee had a chest pain and passed out in the lab. I was there to see how he was. And then the casualties from District Eight came in.

Today, hell. Lt Jackson wishes the war was over today. Why couldn't it have ended six days ago?

"Mike, do you need a minute?", asked General Paylor sweetly. As sweetly as my mother did, when I was a farmboy in Nine. Before the fucking shitheads shot my father's left eye out the back of his skull, and made Mom their damned Avox. And I escaped to Thirteen alone, got enrolled in school and was put to work farming. And became buddies with Boggsy and Portia.

Mom. Dad. Boggsy. Portia. Prim. Prim's mom. Does everyone I love have to die for these bastards?

"I'm sorry, General, my mind was wandering.".

Portia's married and wounded, not dead.

Shit.

Prim's mom must be in a state. Maybe envies her dead husband, who didn't suffer through this week.

"Enlighten us, please, on where your mind went, Mike."

"Mrs Everdeen must be devastated right now".

"I am sure she is. So what can we learn from this video, so we have a reason to thank her for losing a child who served with us?"

"Medics need to follow the chain of command. If they'd asked us if it was safe, we might not have sent them in.", I said softly.

"And?"

"If people look up to you, and you do something dumb, they may follow. Like the lief-corporal who charged that gate. Like Soldier Everdeen and the medics."

Hawthorne suddenly blushed beet red. Perhaps he remembered stepping on Boggsy's face and running with the Mockingjay into Paylor's gun emplacement, during the Battle of Eight. Boggsy told me the story and his decision not to report the incident to Coin, who might have had Hawthorne courts-martialled for insubordination, and shot. What drove his decision was the fact that the Capitol lost seven hovercraft in that raid. He saw Everdeen and Hawthorne down all seven. Letting Hawthorne have the reputation of a hero, instead of a dead headstrong fuckup, gave Plutarch a wildly improbable story to tell...that two kids shooting arrows, downed six hovercraft and disabled a seventh, whose pilot screwed up and crashed it into a warehouse. Five arrows, seven kills. The Capitol would never believe that story and would scour their reconnaissance photos for some secret weapons system we were using. Which would keep them distracted while Paylor rolled up the enemy in Eight, and Gray started preparing for the big push from Seven.

"Mrs Everdeen lost a daughter. But Primrose led the charge and forty-one medics followed. There was one survivor. The wounded would have been killed by the bombs. The shitheads who were steaaling civilian clothes from those wounded, and escaping, would have been killed by the bombs. But now, fifteen families, who had a son or daughter in the infantry, lost them, because Lief-Corporal Ryan ran out, without orders, and they followed. Sergeant Raybee got killed in the cluster fuckup, trying to unsnarl it. He leaves his family behind in Thirteen. And forty families lost a son or daughter who trusted the younger Everdeen, and followed her into the kill zone. And got killed by the bombs. Now, Mister Fuser, what have you learned about lizard mutts, that requires a meeting with my intelligence chief?"

O

Feeling about six inches tall, I spoke.

"General, the Lizard Mutts have been genetically engineered to destroy their own DNA when any are killed. They drop what they are doing and eat their own dead. This makes it very difficult to discern from any DNA we do recover, how the mutts were designed. We do not know their numbers. We do not know how they breed. Or if they breed. We do not know how they were intended to be controlled. We do not know who was controlling them when they were released. And we do not know what controls them now".

"Or whom.", added Paylor. She sounded like she had already figured this out and was waiting for me to learn it.

"That is correct, General. The Lizard Mutts may be roaming freely around the city, following their instincts, with no one now in control. Or conceivably, someone may be steering them toward some target, using systems we do not yet know about. My orders came from President Coin. I am to answer those questions as soon as possible."

I felt like someone else was speaking for me because my feelings were trapped in the battle video I just watched. I trained Ryan. Ryan was a crack shot and an amazing field cook. Raybee was gutsy as they come, a veteran special service soldier who helped the young soldiers keep it together. I had them both on a training exercise outside Thirteen, survival and advanced orienteering, the day the Capitol launched a bunker missile attack and air strikes on us. They both had a few hovercraft kills, and we captured three shitheads who survived, which got us updated maps of pods and access codes for the raid on Snow's torture chamber. We took damage, but zero casualties. We also learned that the Capitol was trying to map our tunnels, using the reflected sound from the bunker missile explosions. In fact, we learned that because that nervous little shit Ryan, noticed an object attached to a small parachute, and I went out to inspect it, and suspected it to be a sound sensor. We retrieved six more of them before the missiles struck, and Beetee rigged them to play music back to the Capitol. Instead of the sound of us getting bombed, they heard an ancient song about a hummingbird heartbeat sung by someone named Katy Perry.

But before that, Ryan also thought there were Capitol troops running around in our woods and she shot at me when I approached. I could be dead now and have missed the whole thing. Instead, I chewed her out for firing at a target she couldn't see. And...Paylor was saying something important.

"Levias Talbot couldn't make this meeting, because I assigned him a different problem that could be related. Lights, please, Mister Hawthorne."

Paylor's holo came back up, with the image of the hovercraft parachuting bombs onto the wounded civilians and the fleeing shitheads. She made a hand motion to enlarge the image, zooming in on a dark spot above the pilot's seat. The image grew darker and more grainy as she magnified it. But the words came into focus.

"Alma Coin, President, Provisional Republic of Panem."

"Levias Talbot confirmed two facts thus far. Firstly, those are the markings of President Coin's personal hovercraft. Secondly, the markings are counterfeit. The President's hovercraft was being repaired in Thirteen, at the time this picture was taken. We are proceeding on the assumption that someone wants very badly, to convince people that the President killed the Capitol's children and the Mockingjay's kid sister. It might be an ally of Snow. It might be someone entirely different. Whoever it is, has a lot of resources at their disposal. The one resource not at their disposal, were the lives of forty medics. Primrose Everdeen surrendered their lives by following Ryan."

Paylor continued. "I learned a hard lesson in the Battle of Eight. They killed all but four of Portia Talbot's medics, because stupidly I trusted them not to blow up Panem's only liquid oxygen factory, since most of their missiles require liquid oxygen to blast off. I put the hospital in a warehouse on the factory grounds. Portia's patients had all the oxygen they needed. But the Capitol did blow it up, in order to get at the hospitalized rebel wounded, the medics who were treating them, and the Mockingjay, who brought them hope and moral support. Sixty medics burnt to death. Portia and the others would have died, had she not gone out to see what Command sent her."

"Here, twenty-two medics obeyed their orders, which were to wait for my orders. I was not going to order them to approach the Presidential Palace any closer, until we could get a Buffalo or two to provide cover. A Buffalo's magnetometer would have detected the approach of a cloaked hovercraft and would have shot it down with fifty-caliber rounds, before it dropped any bombs. Ryan and Everdeen stepped outside the chain of command, fifteen infantry soldiers and forty-one medics followed, and they all became history."

"Which brings us to our common dilemma. I could criticize the late Primrose Everdeen for disobeying orders. Likewise, Ryan. Those who understand why we bother to follow a chain of command, will see the problem. She led, the others followed, they formed a big cluster of fuckups who all got killed at once. The rest of the population will defend the cluster fuckup because they see Primrose as a hero who risked her own life, to save lives. Although they might go along with blaming Ryan for starting it. Unfortunately, Ryan is dead and there's no one else to courts-martial".

"Plutarch is playing a very dangerous game with this, and the President says I have to go along with his lead. Prim's to be depicted as a pure hero, right out of a be-good-and-get-rich novel by Horatio Alger, who wrote lots of them and died poor. The Capitol are evil buggers who killed their own human shields. Exactly how they ordered the attack, and where the killer plane crew went, is to remain an unsolved mystery when the war crimes trials conclude, unless, of course, Snow actually gave the orders and we prove that.

"Meanwhile, we do not see why this happened. We don't know whose idea it was, to put a lot of wounded children in front of the south gate. We don't know who flew that hovercraft. I'm pretty sure that if Snow had ordered it in, the pilot would have used the kids as human shields, and fired antitank rockets at the tanks on the north. Gray had his tankers all there, exposed. My special service force would have hesitated to down the hovercraft, because the wreckage would kill the children below. The hovercraft would have wrecked our tanks. And maybe Snow would have escaped in it. This way, nobody escaped. The human shields got killed. We marched in and captured Snow alive. But we do not see what the bombing accomplished nor why it was done. Conceivably it is part of a plot to break Snow out of prison later. Perhaps the video we just saw, will be broadcast by hacking into our network, and Plutarch Heavensbee will be accused of a coverup. But that would only wreck the President's credibility. It won't persuade anyone to stop Snow's hanging. It could just as easily be part of something else entirely."

"General, I appreciate your relief at not having to courts-martial Primrose Everdeen for that Charlie Foxtrot at the Palace. It is hard to take, that she didn't follow orders and got forty soldiers killed, who followed her, ma'am. Also there was no excuse for not asking you to detail some troops to search for mutts and remains in the tunnel where Finnick was killed. If someone had gotten killed because the water main wasn't shut off, it would be on us, that we caused or contributed to it, Ma'am."

The General pulled her cap out from her epaulet and unrolled it as she spoke. I got mine out of my belt, just in case she made me salute her.

"Mike, I'd like it if you would impress the importance of following the chain of command at all times, when on duty, upon your personnel. You are going to hunt these mutts where they are. And that's likely in rubble and underground. You're going to have to dig them out with satchel charges on occasion. So I am detailing the Seventh Engineers to do the digging. Also some Buffalo Soldiers to provide fire support and transport. Hawthorne will spearhead that. If something gets chewed up by lizard mutts, I can replace a run-flat tank tire but not a soldier's head. So, armored infantry for fire support."

"I take it from Jacob Talbot's report, despite his best efforts to say as little as possible, that the force of lizard mutts under this city is sizable. They devoured every mutt carcass that Plutarch's Squad 451 killed, and the more they killed, the more kept coming. No trace of our dead are left in that tunnel and no trace of mutts, either. It happened fast, because my own Buffalo column was on scene six hours later, we stepped out to check for survivors, and none of us smelled the rosy-garlicky odor of decomposing mutts.

"At maximum, a lizard mutt can't eat more than one-fifth its weight in one feeding. How does a horse doctor like me know that?"

"I know about animal anatomy. Some snake species can swallow large animals because their skin can stretch. Lizard mutt hide does not stretch. One-tenth would be a safer number. One-twentieth actually sounds reasonable. So we have to plan there are at least twenty live lizard mutts, for every lizard mutt that Squad 451 killed. That's a lot of lizard mutts. They live somewhere. They feed somewhere. Someone kept them alive while waiting for a reason to deploy them. And they shit someplace. The Capitol isn't that big...find where mutt shit odor is strongest, it's a safe bet that the mutts live there. So follow the stink trail back to its source, and you found who bred the damned things."

Paylor shoved her fist into the cap and stretched the fabric. This would keep it the proper shape, when she pulled it on. I did likewise.

"In a few weeks there will be a speedy and public trial of Coriolanus Snow, followed most likely by his hanging. We knew he needed killing, the day we signed up for this fight. The trial is to set an example, that no one should be punished, when there's no proof of their guilt, and punishing people for things they didn't do is plain stupid, because nobody learns to improve their behavior, until they are told what to change."

"The image I do not want broadcast to all the districts, when that trial ends, is of five thousand lizard mutts devouring the hangman and my army, while Snow escapes on a pink-and-chartreuse glider driven by Caesar Flickerman and pulled by two winged purple unicorns, and Plutarch Heavensbee stands in front of the camera slack-jawed, with his thumb up his rectum, watching it happen. Because Plutarch with his thumb up his rectum, is a sight that no one should ever have to see. If that dog needs a good worming, he can damned well do it himself in private. Not on television."

Paylor set the cap on her desk, next to the holo. I was off the hook and did not owe her a salute. I could see Hawthorne struggling not to laugh at Paylor's vivid sendup.

"You have command of those units for one week. I want daily situation reports. We need results, Colonel. Is that clear?"

"Crystal, General."

"Now go eat your sandwich before Spring comes. You're making me hungry."