"Katniss!" I leap up, eyes searching frantically, but mind pulled by the vision of the dark, of the hunt, of the hunger. "Katniss! Get out of here!"
"Why?" she asks, hesitating. Why is she always so stubborn? "What's making that sound?"
"I don't know," I cry, trying to shake my head clear of the images crowding my brain. "Only that it has to kill you." I have never been so certain of anything before. "Run! Get out! Go!"
She pauses, looking around, making plans. My heart crashes against my ribs and I grind my hands into fists, the scream howling with the amplified concussion of a hundred more voices. My skull throbs and my vision jitters. The inconceivable volume of the hatred in my head blocks out every other thought. Every thought but one, why is she not running?
Finally, we're ready to move. Out of the workroom, the call is clearer than ever. I can feel their ravenous frenzy closing from behind us. As we sprint down a ragged train track I hear the screams. The others are staring around frantically, trying to place the sound, but its indistinct, muffled familiarity turns my knees to water.
"Avoxes," I say shakily. "That's what Darius sounded like when they tortured him."
This leads to more discussion, more wasted time as the threat closes in on us, as my blood churns and curdles with the pull of the demand, as the whisper shrieks its triumph, so close to hand. I close my eyes tightly against the hissing, but the quality changes. The echoes are bouncing differently.
"Listen," I whisper, eyes wide with the frantic need to see into the dark. The sound is coming from behind us, but now also below us. And closer. We run.
At a rusty, metal set of steps, we halt. Katniss and Pollux scan the Holo desperately for a way out. My hands twitch at my sides, my neck stretches my jaw forward while the siren call from down the steps croons for me to join them. Urging, pleading, demanding, my skeleton feels like iron drawn to a magnet. I grind my wrists against the cuffs.
A toxically sweet scent drifts up from the stairs, twining its way through my brain, into my nerves, trying to take control of my muscles. join us kill her join us kill her join us kill her
Katniss veers away, hand clamped over her nose, and we pile after her out onto the wide, smooth streets of the Transfer. tear bite claw rip kill kill Like an empty replica of the city above, with blank white walls instead of ornate buildings, the route for the utility traffic is clear and tempting in its hollow illusion of safety. bite claw gouge tear shred Katniss launches an arrow into a gutter and the crashing bloom of fire sends the bodies of giant rats flying to lay in smoking piles around the street. fire burn scorch sear kill We run for the next intersection.
Messalla, ahead and to the side, takes one long stride just barely out of step of the others. A burst of shining golden light flares upward from the floor, transfixing him in its glow. His skin begins to bubble and flow, even as Gale fires at the base of the beam, trying to release him. The chaotic chitter behind us quiets to a more focused singularity as they get closer, honing in, gaining ground.
"Can't help him!" I throw myself against Gale, pressing him forward, my shuddering hands reaching behind to gather Finnick and Jackson as well. Sluggishly, they begin to move away from the horror of the death of their friend. "Can't!" I repeat, pushing Katniss into motion as well. kill cleave rip shred claw
As we finally pick up speed, we're nearing the next intersection and the screaming fury behind us increases as we gain some distance. stop her grab kill claw bite The rise of the whisper's fury, the pull in my blood to join the horde behind us, the sickening vision of Messalla left behind, all crash through my head as we run. Katniss skids to a stop, the rest of us piling up behind as the Transfer fills with the crack of gunfire, a squad of Peacekeepers sprinting toward us. The walls echo with the scream of bullets and arrows as 451 holds its ground against the far out-skilled soldiers, but my hands are pressed against my ears as the ecstatic howl of the whisper shrieks its victory.
From the side tunnel pours a horror of snapping, squealing madness. White-skinned, standing tall like a human, but with long, sharp muzzles and lizard-like tails, the mutts fall on the downed Peacekeepers. I stare in frozen, shocked fascination as they snap and bite their way through the squad, iron strong jaws clamping down and ripping off heads with the swift precision of a business task, but the gluttonous, bloody maws of an animal. join us join us join us
"This way!" Katniss howls over the screams of men and beasts, squeezing around a corner that was marked on the Holo with an ominous, blinking light. When we're all past, she turns and fires into the street where enormous metal gears erupt from the tile with a screeching clamor and begin grinding the intersection into rubble. The squad turns to run, but one of the long, lithe bodies flings itself over the churning teeth, landing with a hiss on our side. A spray of bullets rains over it and it flops back onto the cold street. Jackson and Leeg scream at us to go, turning to fire into the swarm, covering our retreat.
A few more yards down the Transfer and Pollux ducks through a metal doorway marked with giant signs warning against entry. He ushers us along a short walkway and gestures to a tight, narrow pipe opening. crush gasp choke deep I shudder, unable to force my feet toward the black emptiness of the entrance. The hiss grows stronger behind us. we're coming wait we're coming With a choking groan, I heave myself into the pipe.
A short, nightmarish crawl and we open out onto another hell. A narrow, sludgy concrete ledge runs along the wall of the sewer. Toxic odors burn my throat and eyes while malevolent bubbles pop, sending sprays of burning poison flying toward us. Fire spits and flares randomly in the slowly drifting river of waste, both human and chemical.
Pressed against the clammy curve of the wall, we inch our way to a bridge spanning the lethal mess with spidery thin metal webbing. we're coming we're coming we're coming The hiss is in my head, in my blood, in my skin. On the far side of the bridge, we pull ourselves close to the wall and Katniss scans our diminished group with frantic eyes, noticing for the first time not all of us are accounted for.
"Wait!" she cries. "Where are Jackson and Leeg 1?"
Homes is holding her back, keeping her from making their sacrifice meaningless as she tries to re-cross the bridge. It's as though everything is being seen in two perspectives for me. I can see across the bridge from our vantage point, but in flashes and flares, I also see us from the other side, huddled and terrified, trembling and sending out stinking waves of panic and weakness and sweaty fear. It makes me want to throw my head back and scream to the skies with voracious hunger.
"Stand back!" Gale's voice rings out, pulling me from the edge of submission. He launches an arrow across the simmering murk and with a squealing cry of shredding metal the bridge shrieks away from the foundation, sinking into the bubbling, swirling mess just as a torrent of mutts, pouring endlessly from the pipe, reaches it.
Their tails lash in rage and thwarted fury and they scream Katniss' name, hurling themselves into the flaming tide in their mad desire to reach her. I feel her name bubble to my own lips and I crouch against the wall, hands pressed over my ears and teeth clamped together to keep the hiss from escaping my tongue.
My eyes fly from the shrieking monsters to their trembling prey. She stands frozen at the foot of the ladder Pollux has begun to scale, Gale and Finnick firing steely-eyed into the horde and Cressida, weapon wavering in her inexperienced hands, but spraying the other side with gunfire. Finnick meets my eyes and I'm transfixed by the fierce determination I find there. I see the finality, the ending he meets with full knowledge of what he loses. I was wrong. He knows how quickly it can all be taken away.
Not in vain. I owe him too much. My legs are shaking so they barely support my weight, but the prosthetic works as a lever and pushing myself to standing, I grab Katniss around the waist, hauling her away from the edge where a long clawed hand has just stretched from the fiery tide to clutch for her. I slam her against the ladder, fastening her numb hands around the rungs and shoving her upward. Slowly, she starts to climb. Pressing her onward from below, I reach behind and snag at Cressida, dragging her behind us. She fumbles at the rungs, but then climbs steadily. Pollux has made it to the top and moves over to a second ladder. Pushing Katniss along, we follow, the scream in my head ringing against my skull so that I can barely grasp the metal. My grip is beginning to slide when Katniss' hand locks around my wrist, hauling me onto the platform. We both help Cressida over the side and I collapse, shaking and pressing against the wall, hands gripping my hair as the shrieking chaos in my head threatens to devour me.
Finnick. I can feel them closing in on him. Feel their triumphant hunger as he boosts a protesting Gale up the ladder and turns to face them alone. I can see, as if through their eyes, the steady sea-green stare and bronze curls. He sweeps an arc of gunfire back and forth three times before turning to follow Gale up the ladder. But there are too many, and they are too fast. My head throbs with the choir of their screams as they climb over each other to reach him. The victorious squeal when one tears into his leg, the coppery smell of his blood pitching them to howling frenzy. I can see the blood pumping in the vein under his soft, weak skin as the neck is pulled back for the death bite. And I can see the triumph in his eyes as the Holo drops down from above, just before it all goes black.
I'm lost, swimming in a dark ocean surrounded by towering swells and a devil current below that pulls at me, drawing me under the cold, clutching emptiness. In the raging chaos of my mind, all I can hear is the whisper, the call, the demand, the fury. I am not myself. I am them. I have no will, no choice.
"Peeta?" The name drags at me, a slow, syrupy call through layers of high pitched screams. "Peeta?" I can't answer, but I have to warn them. I have to get away. I only have moments before I cannot answer for my actions.
"Leave me." It takes all my strength to force the words from lips. "I can't hang on."
"Yes. You can!" She doesn't know. She doesn't see it. Doesn't hear it. She isn't the one who will have to live with what happens when, most cruelly of all, I'm returned to awareness to face what I've done to others.
"I'm losing it." I don't have the words to explain it, I can't debate or compel. I can barely form sentences. "I'll go mad." I shudder away from the reality as the nauseous lump in my belly burns and accuses. "Like them," I choke.
My eyes won't focus, I don't know if they're even open, I can't tell. All I can see is the waves crashing over my head, pulling me under. My ears ring with the scream of the whisper and my muscles are locked in an iron struggle for control. I am a prisoner within my own body, my own mind.
But then I feel the warmth of her breath, smell her skin, and then, taste her lips against my own. My mind swings and pinwheels and flares, the shriek of the whisper demanding I grab her, bite her, tear her. But deep in my chest, low in my belly, another demand awakes. A hunger, a longing, a desire so familiar and so sweet it will not be denied. It throbs and hums in my skin, rising up through my blood and coursing through my breath. My body convulses, shaking and shivering as the warmth floods through me, battling the freezing, stony fury for control.
She leans her forehead against mine, twining her strong, steady fingers through my tremblingly weak ones. "Don't let him take you from me," she commands.
The whisper's howling scream and the flaring visions rage across my mind. I cling to her voice, follow it through the darkness, use it as a shield against the nightmare images real and imagined. "No. I don't want to…" I feel myself slipping under. It's not enough. I'm not enough. What I want is of no consequence, and never has been.
Her hands grip mine tighter, fingers digging in and holding me with her claim. "Stay with me."
And my heart answers her. Stretching back across time and change, through manipulation and lies, back to the only me that was ever real. The promise I made that etched its truth between us, that tied me to her forever and for all time.
"Always."