Chapter Six

The Peacekeepers surround us at once, but it's not soon enough. I've seen the pink spray of blood and flesh. Then I notice the gun pressed against Katniss - lengthwise, sure, but its proximity to her raises my temperature, anyway. I shove the Peacekeeper away from her. "We're going! We get it, all right!" It may not be the most politic thing I have ever done, but I can think of nothing except for getting her away from their weapons. I throw my arm around her shoulders and lead her back into the Justice Building.

Once inside the building, we stumble over to where Haymitch, Effie, Portia and Cinna are standing, staring blankly at a screen mounted to the wall. There is no picture there - just static.

Effie notices us first and lurches toward us, her dark orange wig slightly off-kilter. But I'm happy to see her - it's as if we had peeled off a layer of this silly, colorful world to reveal the horrors underneath, and I just want to cover it up again. "What happened?" she asks. "We lost the feed just after Katniss' lovely speech, and then Haymitch thought he heard gun fire, and I said it was ridiculous …"

I tune her out and look to Haymitch. The gray tint of his face speaks volumes. He knows. "Nothing happened, Effie," I say, mustering every ounce of calm to my defense. "An old truck backfired."

Two more gunshots ring out at this moment and I feel Katniss waver under my arm.

"Both of you. With me." Haymitch brushes past us and we hurry behind him. He makes for the main staircase and we follow him there, up to the landing, then through a double door into a huge room with chairs and sofas, tables laid out with fruit, water and wine. Our clothes are hung on portable racks against one wall.

Haymitch pauses, looks around, then - pressing his finger to his lips - he reaches out and in two quick motions pulls the microphones off the clips on our chests and stuffs them under a couch cushion. He waves at us to follow him as he sprints from the room, up another staircase, through a series of corridors and old rooms and up to an attic, covered in dust and cobwebs and filled with old furniture, toys, boxes and weapons. He pulls up the ladder and closes the attic door behind us and we stand in the semi-darkness for a while, staring at each other. All the time, Haymitch listens, listens. And I don't understand what is going on - but Katniss' face is as a mirror of his, so whatever it is, it's not a complete surprise to either of them.

"What happened?" he asks at last.

I glance at Katniss, but her lips are pursed. So, I give Haymitch a halting recap – trying unsuccessfully to read his stony expression as I do. "Haymitch - what is going on?"

But he looks at Katniss. "It will be better coming from you," he says.

I look at her sharply, but she gazes down, faintly shaking her head.

"Katniss?" I ask.

She sighs – then looks up at me with such an intense expression of regret that I brace myself for the worst. "OK," she begins. "OK – so - just before we left District 12 yesterday - President Snow came to visit me. At my house."

"What!?"

"He told me that the people in the districts didn't believe us - at the end of the Games. And that because they believed something – different – about the end of the Games … some of them are on the verge of - uprisings."

I gape at her. "Uprisings? 'Believe us?' What do you mean?"

"He said that when I - when we - decided to use the berries, instead of - you know – killing each other ... some of the districts used that as an inspiration, I guess, for rebellion." She shrugs lightly, as if describing a mildly-amusing misunderstanding. "He told me that I - that we need to prove to the districts that it wasn't a rebellious act, but it was all because we were so ... in love. He threatened …" she stops and squints. "He threatened that a war might follow uprisings - if we couldn't contain it soon. He told me that Seneca Crane - the Gamemaker who allowed us both to live - was executed. And he threatened my family and - friends. He warned me - that he knew we hadn't been keeping up - the act. He even knew that Gale kissed me once."

Haymitch stirs, but I'm rooted in place. Katniss looks closely at me, as if silently begging me to understand. I can think of no words – nothing - so she swallows visibly and just – keeps saying things. For the first time, ever, I find something annoying about the sound of her voice. "I just wanted to keep on like I always have, go back to how it was before. But I can't. And I was supposed to fix things on the tour. Make everyone who doubted believe that I acted out of love. Calm things down. But obviously, all I've done today is get three people killed, and now everyone in the square will be punished."

She collapses onto an old couch. Both she and Haymitch look up at me, waiting for my reaction, as if I'm a little kid they've disappointed somehow. A rush of anger - composed equally of frustration, jealousy and terror - comes over me. I'm almost dizzy with the sensation of it. Her words have finally penetrated and they bring an awful realization. By her silence, she made me a co-conspirator in the deaths occurring outside right now. "Then I made things worse, too. By giving away the money." There's something next to me - it's an old lamp or something - and I swipe at it angrily, knocking it down. Glass and dust scatter around me, and it's kind of satisfying. But when I look at the palms of my hands, the shadows on them spark the memory of blood. I glare at the ashen-faced girl. "This has to stop. Right now. This - this - game you two play, where you tell each other secrets but keep them from me, like I'm too inconsequential or stupid or weak to handle them!"

"It's not like that, Peeta -" she starts, as if she could possibly fix any of this, retroactively.

"It's exactly like that! I have people I care about, too! Family and friends back in 12 who will be just as dead as yours if we don't pull this thing off." The hurt is a physical thing inside me now, a burning sensation. Why the hell didn't she just let me die? Seriously, it would have been better than this. "So, after all we went through in the arena, don't I even rate the truth from you?"

She drops her eyes and Haymitch steps in. "You're always so reliably good, Peeta. So smart about how you present yourself before the cameras. I didn't want to disrupt that."

I stare at him a moment. Cameras? Presentation? So, I'm still just an actor in someone else's pageant. In the meanwhile, I just saw someone's head get blown off. Real life is intruding. "Well, you overestimated me," I spit at him. "Because I really screwed up today. What do you think is going to happen to Rue and Thresh's families? Do you think they'll get their share of our winnings? Do you think I gave them a bright future? Because I think they'll be lucky to survive the day!" The thought of those delicate little kids - Rue's siblings, small and underfed, like she was, but also likewise fierce, worth saving - makes my eyes blur. And I see people - other people I couldn't save. Kids, also. Dylan and Bet and Neon ….

There's some headless statuette on a shelf between me and Haymitch, and everything about it annoys me – if you are going to be broken, you might as well be thoroughly broken. I throw it across the room, finishing the job. The others don't even react as if, of course, they expected the tantrum from me – the child allowed to know nothing – and all they have to do is wait for it to blow over.

But Katniss eventually stirs, giving me a look I am forced to return. "He's right, Haymitch," she says. "We were wrong not to tell him. Even back in the Capitol."

Oh, yes. Something else I haven't thought about in a long time. Things that slowly dawned on me after I returned home and remembered everything that happened in the Games - sleep syrup sent to control me - food sent as a reward for her pretending to like me. It's still something I haven't been able to reconcile – to be grateful for my life while also resenting the fiction that saved it. "Even in the arena - you two had some sort of system worked out, didn't you? Something I wasn't part of."

"No, not officially. I just could tell what Haymitch wanted me to do by what he sent, or didn't send."

It all comes flooding back in, the feeling of being the leftover tribute; willing to give myself up for her, but no acknowledgement of it on her side. And nothing from Haymitch but his scowls and his reminders to 'stay alive,' as if that was even useful advice. "Well, I never had that opportunity. Because he never sent me anything until you showed up."

She looks at me sharply. She knew this before, but maybe she never really thought about how it felt to me. She looks so sorry for me that I almost have to forgive her.

"Look, boy," says Haymitch.

But I don't want to hear from him. I can't ever be sure if he's telling me the truth, or just what's convenient to whatever scheme he happens to be working on. I've wanted so badly to trust him, and again I've been fooling myself. So – time to stop trying. "Don't bother, Haymitch. I know you had to choose one of us. And I'd have wanted it to be her. But this is something different. People are dead out there. More will follow, unless we're very good. We all know I'm better than Katniss in front of the cameras. No one needs to coach me on what to say. But I have to know what I'm walking in to."

"From now on, you'll be fully informed."

I shake my head. "I better be." Then I turn on my heel, pull open the door, lower the ladder and leave them.

I wander down hallways and stairs for a while, until I find the big landing and the big marble staircase. I go into the big room, and see, of course, Portia, sitting patiently on the couch, waiting for me. She gives me a smile.

"Doing OK?"

"I've been better."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"No." I try to smile. "For one thing, I'm not sure I'm allowed."

"Got you. Ready to change for dinner?"

"Any time," I say, and let her lead me away.

She leads me to some fancy guest bedroom, and while I shower, I run through all the threads of my anger, separating them out into manageable parts. Frustration is spent, shattered into pieces in the attic.

Terror, though? It's indestructible. All my personal sense of grievance – that feeling I wallowed in of wounded self-righteousness – seems so laughable now. Holy shit, we are in some brand new kind of trouble and although, yes, I absolutely should have known – I kind of miss being in the dark about this. But now that I'm not, I need to try to find a way to forgive Katniss and Haymitch because – literally – the world is going to fall apart if we can't all get on the same page.

I try to take comfort in the fact that they are that confident in my speaking abilities – that they honestly seem to think I bring some value to this endeavor. My skill in front of the cameras is such a recent discovery, I am constantly surprising even myself. But – it doesn't really add up. Oh, that might have been Haymitch's reasoning – it's very like him to dole out information in as small of a serving as he can get away with. But I don't believe for a second that Katniss' decision not to confide in me has anything to do with that.

It's this romance thing, again. She can't talk about it because it upsets or embarrasses her that much. And because she's never really been able to talk to me about Gale. (And, apparently, there is not as much there as I thought. He kissed me once? That was a really unexpected revelation. Why would she have bothered to offer it? And why do I care so much? Good, old-fashioned jealousy – also indestructible.)

The problem is … the problem is … there's no escaping it. Nor can I now stop it. I may have initiated it, stumbling like a bull into the strategy of star-crossed lovers, but it's moved way beyond me. The story of me and Katniss belongs to the Capitol now, and any whisper of hope that there might one day be a genuine spark of romance with her - cultivated over time, when this whole mess was behind us - dissolves like the hot air that it is. This mess will never be behind us. In ten days or so, we'll be in the Capitol. In a few months, we'll be back there again, for the Games, holding hands and kissing for the cameras again. And the year after that. And the year after that.

Unless, I think suddenly, there really are uprisings. Unless there really is a rebellion. But that seems absurd. The citizens of the districts are beat down, weak and unarmed. I can see how they would take inspiration from Katniss - I can easily see it. But she's - a mistake. She's not a spawn of oppression like the rest of us. She had her father, who flouted Capitol restrictions as if they didn't exist. And taught her the same. You'd need hundreds like her, in every district, to maintain a rebellion. Wouldn't you?

When I get out of the shower, my skin is pink and wrinkled, and my head is reeling with my thoughts. I'm startled to find not just Portia but Haymitch in my room. I frown at him while I tie my towel around my waist. "Yes?"

"Peeta," he says. Then he pauses – for way too long a moment. Don't, I think - don't. Don't make something up in your head, some more diplomatic way to tell me. Just tell me. "I know you're mad, and I get it. I do. But you can't be mad at Katniss. Not for this. I told her before – back in the Capitol – that you work best in spontaneity, and she was simply continuing that strategy. Obviously, things are changing."

"I'm not mad at Katniss," I tell him, knowing that he has indeed dissembled and trying not to care. That Katniss would 'work best in spontaneity' was his excuse for keeping her in the dark about my plans – does he think I'm too stupid to remember this?

He narrows his eyes at me. "If you want me to be straight with you, you need to learn to be straight with yourself."

Or – wait – is he using this double-speak with me on purpose; establishing our own codes? This is too confusing. And all my energy right now is being sacrificed in the attempt not to be furious with him. "I'm not mad at Katniss," I repeat, calmly. "Am I disappointed? Of course, of course I am! But she didn't ask to deal with my feelings. Or even her feelings for me, whatever they are. I created that mess, and now we'll never see the end of it."

"I'm glad you figured that out."

I shake my head. "I'm not just the pretty face of this trio," I snark.

His face almost breaks into an actual smile.

"But," I add more seriously, "I'd figure things out faster if people would clue me in on at least the basic information. We've all already lied so much to each other, we've got a big hole to dig out of just to establish some basic trust. Hints and asides aren't going to cut it."

"Yes, I agree. ... Peeta … don't think she's - indifferent to you. If she was, she wouldn't be trying so hard to protect you."

"Yeah, I know that, too, Haymitch," I say coolly. But whether he means it, or is just saying it in order to get a better performance out of me, I'm comforted, nonetheless.

Portia doesn't say anything while I dress. I wish I knew how much she and Cinna know about what's going on. I've always suspected it was slightly more than she ever let on. But I can't put her at risk by confiding about what's actually happening, so I'm silent.

I don't even process what she dresses me in; it will match or complement Katniss' outfit, as usual. She leaves me to my prep team to touch up my hair and makeup, then they go with me downstairs to join the rest of the party outside the dining room.

Effie is arranging everyone in a processional. My prep team is needed at the front of the line; I will enter last, with Katniss. I approach her, crossing a black and white tile floor to where she stands under an elaborately-carved marble arch. She's dressed in a pink strapless gown. There's a silver wrap around her arms, but her shoulders are bare and I stare at them with a heightened sort of longing. Her skin glows under the thin yellow light from the wall lamps. Her hair is in loose, flirty curls. And then it dawns on me. Cinna is dressing her for me, because it's my job tonight to do - in pretense - what I would be tempted to do in real life. To flirt with her in front of the cameras. To try to persuade kisses from her pink lips. To come up with a reason to touch the skin of her shoulders. And it will be her job to accept all this.

Some music starts up and the prep teams go down a short staircase to the formal dining room. She turns to me with a smile and I take her hand. We must look like some Capitol teenagers on one of their fancy dates – like you see on TV shows designed to make you envious of their dressed-up, grown-up, fully-lived lives; although maybe they don't realize how odd and fake it seems to us in the Districts. Odd and fake – that about captures this current moment.

And yet – even if the game is still just a game, at least we both now know what exactly – who exactly – is being played. That's something.

I clear my throat. "Haymitch says I was wrong to yell at you. You were only operating under his instructions. And - it isn't as if I haven't kept things from you in the past."

"I think I broke a few things myself after that interview," she says.

"Just an urn."

"And your hands." She takes her free hand and places it on mine so that it is encased in the shell of her fingers. "There's no point to it, anymore, though, is there? Not being straight with each other?"

She must know - as I do - that we are bound together, now, in this deception, at least until we can find a way out of it. "No point," I answer.

But before I can go on with this, I need to know. Because our pageant involves more than the two of us - especially one other person - perhaps, very intimately. How intimately? I need to know. "Was that really the only time you kissed Gale?"

"Yes," she says, so immediately, and with such a surprised expression, that I know she is not lying to me. That makes me feel better - to know that, although I may be interfering with a potential romance, I'm not intruding on an actual relationship. I tell myself it's because it will help me act more naturally, more freely. That's what I tell myself.

We descend the stairs together. Katniss has to hold up the long skirts of her dress, so I help her keep her balance by crooking my arm around hers. She's always been graceful, but she's developed an elegance, too, since last summer. She raises her chin just a little to meet the applause of the crowd as we enter the dining room.

It's very similar, in some respects, to the all-night feast that followed our coronation in the Capitol last year - clusters of tables, with a special one set aside for her and me. But this time, there is very little mingling among the guests, and certainly fewer people come up to talk with us. Most people are here to eat - probably many of them are here out of some obligation to be, as the statespersons of the district. Whatever, they don't have a lot to say to us. I catch sight of Haymitch, sitting at a far table with some people he seems to know pretty well. I'm reminded that one of his best - one of his only - friends is one of the District 11 Victors.

At one point, Effie floats by to remind us there is dancing after dinner and we are expected to lead it. "Did you watch the tape?" she asks us.

I nod, then glance at Katniss, curiously. Effie sent me - and her, presumably - an instruction video on formal dancing. Sitting by oneself in a living room, watching a tape, is probably not the best way to learn dancing, but it seemed easy enough. Put your hands here and move your feet to and fro.

Eventually, Katniss nods assent and Effie drifts away again. I lean into her. "Look," I say softly, my lips almost brushing her cheek. "You tell me if I cross a line, but when we're dancing it might … be a good time to …."

She nods and her hair tickles my nose.

The slow dancing makes it very easy to fall right back into the act. She's close to me in a way she hasn't really been before, even counting when she helped me get undressed to check out my wounds and clean my clothes in the arena. That was all business - and I was barely conscious, anyway. Now, I'm hyper-aware of every last inch of her. I have to try not to look down at a certain angle, in order to avoid gawking at the place where the curves of her breasts meet the pink frill of her dress.

"You look beautiful," I tell her.

"That's Cinna's doing," she responds, predictably.

I smile at that. "I don't think I've said it to you before - after all these dresses and appearances. I remember - when you found me in the arena, and you were so skinny and dirty - I remember thinking you were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen."

I don't mention the other time - the image of her that has haunted me these past six months. When she held out the berries to me, she looked like someone not even of this earth. Gaunt and desperate, the choice of life or death in her hands.

"Well," she says, "you were dying at the time."

I laugh. "Of course, that must be it."

We close our dance by kissing gently as the music fades, and then other couples come on to the floor and we make our way to the wall near the staircase - far away from our prep teams, getting drunk on the punch on the opposite wall - far from Effie, who is chatting with Portia over by a large fireplace - far from Haymitch. Katniss leans against the wall, complaining about her shoes, and I lean over her - again trying very hard to keep my eyes from misbehaving.

"No lines yet?" I ask her.

She flutters her eyes up to me. "What have you been up to - besides painting - all these months?"

"Not much else. I do some cake decorating for my dad, but that's no more than a couple of hours a week."

"I know."

"What?"

She blushes. "I mean - I saw that you were still doing the cakes. I mean - I could tell they were yours."

"Oh," I say. "Thanks?"

She lightly slaps my arm. "You know that was a compliment. You should learn to take them better."

"So should you," I grin.

She wrinkles her nose at me. "The cakes are what you do. My looks are what Cinna does. It's nothing to do with what I do."

I absently take a strand of her curled hair, straighten it out and let it go to watch it bounce back into shape. Despite the fact that it's all so painfully false, I'm actually grateful for the opportunity to say what I've been longing to say. "You're beautiful," I tell her, "even without all the makeup and sparkles. And the fact is that you're gorgeous right now. But you're right - perhaps I should go whisper that to Cinna. I have a feeling it won't play as well in the Capitol, though."

"We mustn't go off-script," she agrees, but lightly.

"Maybe one day…."

"What?" she asks warily.

I look again at her serious silver eyes. "Maybe one day, they'll get tired of this script and they'll want a different one," I say very softly.

She glances around for the nearest cameraman. "I'm afraid it won't be a different script," she tells me. "It will be more and more they want out of the current one."

In the wreck of her eyes, I see the same bleak future. But I smile. "We'll figure something out."

She takes my hand in hers and squeezes it tightly. I bend down to kiss her lips, and then, because I really want to know what it feels like - and who knows what Cinna's wardrobe choices will be in the future - I touch my lips very gently to her left shoulder. She shakes her head.

"Line?" I ask her, still smiling.

"I don't know … maybe. Maybe - build up to it? We have a lot of districts left to go."