Chapter Fifteen
The reaping ceremony done, Katniss, Haymitch, Effie and I are marched by Peacekeepers through the Justice Building - right out through the back to the waiting car. No hour to say good-bye to our friends and loved ones. It seems like nothing more than a spiteful act - no purpose to it. I think in horror of the last words I had been formulating in my head, and feel a moment of sheer gratitude that I had one good day with my mother, that I took care to hang out with my friends. As soon as she realizes what's happening, Katniss almost collapses, and immediately starts to cry.
On board the train, she runs to a window and presses her face to the glass, staring at 12 while it recedes - the train station pulling away, the fence line crossed, the surrounding hills and woods swallowing up the gray buildings of the town square. This is very different from last year, when her stoicism was something of a marvel to me. I'm a little worried. What if she can't get into the right headspace for the Games?
Or, I guess it's just my turn to be the calm one.
"We'll write letters, Katniss," I say. "It will be better, anyway. Give them a piece of us to hold on to. Haymitch will deliver them for us if … they need to be delivered."
She nods and heads off to her sleeping car. I turn to Effie. "Did you get that box of tapes back, Effie?"
"Yes, they're in the media car, dear. Do you still have some to watch?"
I shrug. "Rewatch, I guess. But after dinner."
I go to shower and change, then lie down on my bed for a while. I try to focus on the upcoming week. Learning who the reaped tributes are. What to focus on in the training center. What Caesar will ask me about this time. But all my thoughts return, again and again, to the last train trip. It's the sound of the tracks - that constant whir and the slight rocking - forcing me to remember the nights spent in her bed. The way her body curled up next to mine. After keeping a deliberate distance from her over the last couple of months, my defenses are way down.
At least now there is no real reason anymore for distance. Anything said or done from here to the end can be remembered by her as just part of the strategy. Home is left free of any associations with me except for the brief months of friendship. The train - the stage - the arena. These impermanent places of fake kisses and false promises. The nightmare land which is the only place I have ever been loved.
I take out the notebook and stare at my pages and pages of notes. But I'm pulled to a blank page, and - tentatively, cautiously - begin to draw, afraid of wolf mutts leaping out of my pencil. But instead I draw something from an old myth: the daughter of summer, emerging from the crack in the ground - the entrance to the underworld - to the fields where her mother waits with open arms. Damn, that would make a good subject for a painting, I think to myself, once it's almost done and Effie has interrupted me with her knock on the door, calling me to dinner. The verdant world, all greens and sun-drenched blues, coming to life in the foreground; and underneath it, just the peek at the orange fires in the darkness, the ashy fruits of the dead trees….
Effie and I sit across from the others at the dinner table, and the Katniss and Haymitch side of the table could not look more glum and subdued. While there is not the same striking similarity between them as there is between her and Gale, they are both remarkably alike in their expressions right now. As if storm clouds had faces. Haymitch refuses wine, with a little glare in my direction, then stares at his glass of water as if he could transform it to booze with the intensity of his gaze.
"I love your new hair, Effie," I say into the grim silence.
"Thank you! I had it especially done to match Katniss' pin. I was thinking we might get you a gold ankle band and maybe find Haymitch a gold bracelet or something so we could all look like a team."
I'm not sure Effie would be helping herself at all by closer association with us, but this seems harmless enough. "I think that's a great idea. What about it, Haymitch?"
He doesn't lift his eyes from his dinner plate. "Yeah, whatever."
"Maybe we could get you a wig, too," says Katniss, teasingly, and he glares at her.
We finish dinner in silence, then Effie says it's about time for the recap of the reapings. I go get my notebook and join everyone in the media car just as the anthem is starting up on the broadcast.
I have organized all the living victors' names in my notebook by district, so I can quickly check them off as they are called. Cashmere and Gloss - brother and sister tributes from District 1 and winner of consecutive games about eleven and twelve years ago, respectively. The first volunteer comes, naturally, from District 2, where Brutus - an imposingly muscular man in his early middle age - maybe 40 - replaces a boy who won just two years ago. Enobaria - who I think maybe won the first game I remember watching, when I was three or four - is reaped next. Anyway, she is beloved in the Capitol and is constantly being interviewed, so I know her well. She was pinned to the ground when she ripped her attacker's throat out with her teeth (a detail I had forgotten – or blocked – until we rewatched the games). They are now filed and tipped with gold, a tribute to her most famous action. Like her district partner, she looks to be in extremely good shape and almost eager to be a part of it all again.
The careers are rounded off by Finnick Odair - easily the most famous Victor until Katniss and I came along - who won ten years ago, but is still only in his early twenties, and Mags, an extremely old woman who volunteers in place of Annie, the girl who won five years ago, almost by accident, and seemed - at least according to her interviews - to have gone a bit insane since then. Mags is the one whose tape I thought we got by mistake and I can't believe it as she hobbles up to the stage, using a cane. She looks like any regular old exertion will kill her, let alone the arena. This is crazy.
There's one other recent winner among the tributes - Johanna Mason from 7, who won the year after Annie did, and is all scowls as she takes her place on the stage. Apart from that, all the other victors reaped again today seem to be in their thirties and up, with several other elderly tributes and most of them not in nearly the shape of Brutus. Except for the District 11 tributes, who, unhappily, are among Haymitch's closest friends, especially Chaff, the tall, strong man I remember seeing with Haymitch on the Tour. Even so - Chaff looks to be near 50, and he's missing his left hand. His partner, Seeder, is at least ten years older.
Haymitch and Effie both sigh and make some small, unhappy comments as the reapings go on. I realize that in order to get through this, Katniss and I may have to actually kill off some of Haymitch's friends. That old panic - my distaste for killing - rises up in me again, but I mentally squash it. I'm going to have to do better than that, this year.
After the reaping broadcast concludes, Haymitch goes moodily off to bed, and Effie follows shortly afterward. I stare down at my notes and am keenly aware that Katniss is looking at me. So, I start pulling out the pages of victors who were not reaped, trying not to remember working on the plant book with her, feeling her stare at me ….
"Why don't you get some sleep," I finally say.
"What are you going to do?"
"Just review my notes for a while. Get a clear picture of what we're up against. But I'll go over it with you in the morning." I look up at her and try to smile. "Go to bed, Katniss."
When she goes, I pop Gloss' game into the tape player, with the thought of skimming each of the Career's games tonight, just to remind myself of their fighting styles. By the time I get to Brutus, I'm already a little tired of the exercise, and there's not much to learn about him, anyway. A typical Career in a typical Career year. He seems to like swords and also breaking people's necks. There's such a resemblance to Cato that I wonder uneasily if he's a relative. Well. We'd be enemies under any circumstances in the arena, now. But I've always dreaded my betrayal of the careers coming back to haunt me.
I lose focus after a while and go back to finishing my sketch. I figure I can give it to Portia - kind of a parting gift. Time passes quickly in this exercise, and by the time I hear the noise of someone joining me in the compartment, Brutus' three-hour broadcast is three-quarters over.
It's Katniss, now in a robe over her shorts and t-shirt. She looks sick and troubled. The tape is just about to the part where Brutus kills his district partner after a long sword fight, so I get up and turn it off. "Couldn't sleep?" I ask her.
"Not for long,"
Her face reflects the receding nightmares, a silent accusation that I was not there to protect her from them.
"Want to talk about it?"
She swallows and shakes her head, and at last I relent, holding out my arms to her. She steps into them at once and wraps her arms around my neck so tightly that she brings my head down toward hers. I bury my face in her long, loose hair and my lips are on her neck. Her skin is cool and soft. I feel her breath get heavier against me, the rise and fall of her chest. My body comes to life as if it's been hibernating for all these months, and its hunger rises like blood. I wait for her to pull away, because I'm not going to be able to let her go, but she makes no move to break the embrace.
A Capitol attendant arrives and forces us to part. He's carrying a tray with a jug and two mugs. I smell warm milk and cinnamon. "I brought an extra cup," he tells Katniss.
"Thanks," she says, as he sets it down on the coffee table in front of the TV.
"And I added a touch of honey to the milk. For sweetness. And just a touch of spice." The man - a small little man with a thin, little mustache and watery eyes - looks at us with a wistful expression, shakes his head and goes.
"What's with him?"
I ease myself down on the couch and angle myself carefully. "I think he feels bad for us," I say, not adding that he's clearly a fan of the star-crossed lovers saga.
"Right," she grumbles, sitting next to me and pouring milk into the cups.
"I mean it. I don't think the people in the Capitol are going to be all that happy about our going back in. Or the other victors. They get attached to their champions."
"I'm guessing they'll get over it once the blood starts flowing," she replies, dryly. And I don't argue, because, really - what is my proof? We'll never know, anyway. But I file away the thought for later use. I'm fairly adept at working the sympathies of the Capitol crowd - maybe something can be done with it.
"So, are you watching all the tapes again?"
"Not really. Just sort of skipping around to see people's different fighting techniques."
"Who's next?"
"You pick."
She digs through the box of tapes, finally pulling one out and blinking at it with a curious expression. She holds it out towards me - it's Haymitch's game. "We never watched this one."
I shake my head. "No. I knew Haymitch didn't want to. The same way we didn't want to watch ours. And since we're on the same team, I didn't think it mattered much."
"Is the person who won in twenty-five in here?"
"I don't think so. Whoever it was must be dead by now, Effie only sent me victors we might have to face." I take the tape from her and consider it for a while. I've always been curious, and it seems she is too. "Why? Do you think we should watch it?"
She shrugs. "It's the only Quell we have. We might pick up something valuable about how they work. We don't have to tell Haymitch we saw it."
I ponder this, thinking of Haymitch's ravaged expression. By killing kids. It might be a mistake to watch. But … "OK," I agree.
I'm rewarded for my agreement by her curling up against me - just as she did in our victory interviews last year, when she was desperately trying to prove that she loved me - in order to watch. I'm not sure how I'll ever be able to concentrate on the tape, but, in fact, it turns out to be pretty compelling viewing.
First off, the announcement of the Quell, featuring a much younger President Snow - but even then at least 15 years into his reign - reminds me of what Haymitch said about the vacuum of smart, strategic, moral people at the head of the government. And then I wonder how Haymitch could possibly know that. Do the mentors have some way of getting a hold of that kind of information during the games? Not just mentors - any former Victor can spend the summer in the Capitol during the games, like Finnick Odair - legendarily romancing Capitol sponsors and other VIPs, whether he is mentoring or not.
Then we get to the reapings, which take twice as long and - though I was aware of it beforehand - are actually mind-boggling with the sheer numbers of tributes. District 12's reaping includes three Seam kids - and one Townie, a familiar-looking blonde girl called Maysilee Donner.
"Oh!" says Katniss, suddenly, straightening up. "She was my mother's friend."
"I think that's your mother hugging her," I say softly.
Katniss stares, open mouthed, at three blonde girls on the screen. They are all 16 or 17 - her mother, Maysilee and another girl, who looks like she might be Maysilee's twin. "Madge," she breathes.
"That's her mother," I say, two thoughts suddenly connecting in my head. "She and Maysilee were twins or something. My dad mentioned it once - Madge's aunt died in the games."
"The mockingjay pin," says Katniss, her expression showing that some new knowledge is just dawning on her. "It was hers. Madge gave it to me. Insisted I wear it."
I'm just starting to think through this startling information when the two boys from the Seam are reaped - the second one being Haymitch. He's cocky, straight-backed - so young. Although from the Seam, he appears to be well-fed and strong. And with his curly dark hair and those silver Seam eyes, surprisingly good looking.
"Oh, Peeta - you don't think he killed Maysilee, do you?" asks Katniss, upset.
"With forty-eight players? I'd say the odds are against it." But now I'm dreading it myself.
There are so many tributes that we get only the vaguest introductions to them - long shots of the chariot rides, a snippet or two of training - a glimpse of their interviews with Caesar. Even the Career pack gets shorter shrift than usual. Since this is Haymitch's games, he gets a lot of face time, of course. He's solitary and aloof in the training center, snarky and arrogant in his interview.
The arena is gorgeous - gorgeous and deadly on its own. All the plants and the water are poisonous; even the most benign-looking muttation - butterfly, squirrel, candy-colored bird - is lethal. On the fourth day, a volcano erupts, killing twelve players. It's the perfect example of a non-career game, designed no doubt to kill tributes at double speed so that the whole thing doesn't take too long. After the eruption, only thirteen of the forty-eight tributes remain. But that takes the advantage away from the careers and gives it to smarter players - like Haymitch. Haymitch, who was wary of the mountain from day one, always moving away from it. He gets a pack of supplies at the cornucopia that includes enough food to sustain him, as he eats it very sparingly. He sticks to the woods on the opposite side of the arena, and he is constantly moving in one direction, refusing to be turned aside - at least for very long.
On day 6, he reaches the end of the woods and finds a thick growth of hedges separating him from what looks like an open plain. The hedges turn him around and he goes back into the woods, running into three of the careers. He pulls out a knife and - I can't help smiling at this despite what is about to happen - swings it in a familiar way as he lunges straight into combat. This Haymitch is younger, stronger, quicker, more determined to save his own skin, and he has his first two kills almost right away, stabbing one career in the throat and the other up the gut in seconds. But the third disarms him and is about to cut his throat with his own knife when he drops to the ground, a dart in his back.
This comes courtesy of Maysilee herself who - to the profound astonishment of both Katniss and myself - has proved every bit as cunning as Haymitch. Her own pack of supplies included a set of darts - one of the truly perfect weapons for this arena. Where a Townie girl picked up the aim and arm strength for it, I'll never know, but she uses the lethal poisons from some bright blue flowers to turn her darts into extremely effective weapons. Before she even runs into Haymitch, she has killed three tributes with the things. I think of Madge learning archery from Katniss and my whole opinion of the Donner-Undersee family undergoes a tremendous shift.
"We'd live longer with the two of us," she says coolly, to Haymitch.
"Guess you just proved that. Allies?"
I sneak a glance at Katniss. It's like I can see the origins of Haymitch's strategy with us forming in front of my eyes. It's a relief - it makes them instantly more rootable - to see the tributes from both sides of the District 12 divide team up in that instant, unhesitatingly. But to link two district partners together is a risky scheme. Such an alliance cannot be easily broken without repercussions - at least it's understood this way back in 12. It's smart, at the outset, to be in an alliance with someone you can almost completely trust. But come to the end of the arena, the alliance must be broken and, unless you're a Career - for whom alliances are made to be broken - a horrible choice awaits you. As Katniss and I well know. I start to get very nervous about the outcome of this game.
But at first, it works out well. They split the weapons and food from the Career packs, sleep in shifts, figure out how to collect rainwater. Twice they run into individual tributes, who stand no chance against his speed and her lethal darts. Haymitch continues his quest to get beyond the woods, and this is their one area of disagreement.
"Why?" she asks him.
And then Haymitch says the most radical thing I've ever heard said in the arena, and possibly one of the main reasons this game has never, to my knowledge, re-aired. "Because it has to end somewhere, right? The arena can't go on forever."
"What do you expect to find?"
"I don't know. But maybe there's something we can use." But I can tell by his evasive tone that he doesn't mean that - not exactly. He's planning to find a way to step straight out of the arena, if he can - out to whatever surrounds it. Maybe I am good at seeing the big picture, I guess, but this thought never even occurred to me last year. To me - the arena felt like the entire world, unending, where I was under constant surveillance. Where the Gamemakers controlled the weather, activated traps to pull us all together to battle, sent mutts after us, refused to let us win together. But the arena, in reality, is finite - and outside it, who knows?
Haymitch acquired a blow torch from the careers who attacked him and now he returns to the hedges and patiently blasts his way through them, while Maysilee stands guard - despite her protestations. She has a point. By this time, they are very near the end, and even ignore a call to a feast that leaves all but three other tributes dead.
On the other side of the hedges, they find themselves on a hard, flat cliff. It's a sheer-looking cliff, and very high - the canyon far below them is covered in jagged rocks.
"That's all there is, Haymitch. Let's go back."
And part of me agrees with her, wholeheartedly. They are more than capable of taking out the last three opponents. But - then what? The great dilemma of the games. That the Capitol is not content with merely pitting the districts against each other. No, they force the district tributes to turn on each other. Friend against friend. Brother against sister, even. Two lovers. Because - why encourage cooperation, in any form? Alliances are too dangerous for the people in power.
Haymitch refuses to leave. He hasn't hunted anyone - only killing when attacked - and he's not about to start now. Not when there's a puzzle to solve. So, it's up to her to break the alliance.
"All right. There's only five of us left. May as well say good-bye now, anyway. I don't want it to come down to you and me."
"OK," he agrees, and, though I'm sad that he doesn't protest or even look at her when she leaves him, I'm so relieved to know that their final confrontation is much less likely now, that I almost cheer him.
Haymitch fixates on the cliff. He walks up and down the rim, as if looking for a place on the rock face that might be climbable. At one point, he accidentally kicks a small rock down into the canyon, and he watches it as it falls. Then he sits down, still determined to figure this out, when the pebble comes flying back up the canyon. With a manic smile, he grabs a larger rock and throws it over the cliff. This, too, returns to him, and he starts to laugh.
It's at that moment that Maysilee's screams ring throughout the air, echoing against the canyon walls. Without hesitation, Haymitch runs toward the sound and finds her dying in the woods, a victim of a flock of pink birds with long, razor-sharp beaks - many of which lay dead around her, felled by her darts. She never regains consciousness, and Haymitch holds her hand in silence until the cannon sounds.
The camera then switches to the last of the career tributes, one of the girls from District 1, who kills one of the last of the other two tributes by the cornucopia and tracks down the second in the woods, just before he is killed by squirrels. She finds the burned hedges that mark Haymitch's trail and pursues him, back into the woods, forcing him into close-range combat - his knife against her axe. This part is hard to watch. He receives catastrophic wounds in his gut and his last-ditch attempt at throwing his knife at her takes out her eye, but doesn't kill her. As she staggers around for a moment, in what must be incomprehensible pain, he makes his escape - back to the cliff. When she finally resumes her pursuit of him, he is nearly done, anyway. His blood is seeping through the hands that are covering his belly wound. When she throws her axe at him, he doesn't so much dodge the weapon as collapse to the ground at the exact right time. Her axe goes over the cliff edge and she stands there, holding her hands to her face while he starts convulsing. He's probably got minutes left when the axe returns and lodges itself right in her head. She's dead at once, making Haymitch the winner of the games, though their haste in retrieving him from the cliff seems none too soon.
I click off the tape and Katniss and I spend a minute absorbing what we've seen.
"That force field at the bottom of the cliff," I say at last. "It was like the one on the roof of the training center, the one that throws you back if you try to jump off it and commit suicide. Haymitch found a way to turn it into a weapon."
"Not just against the other tributes, but the Capitol, too. You know they didn't expect that to happen. It wasn't meant to be part of the arena. They never planned on anyone using it as a weapon. It made them look stupid that he figured it out. I bet they had a good time trying to spin that one."
I contemplate her words. To me, it is not his use of it as a weapon, but the fact that he thought to look for a boundary at all, that strikes me as the thing the Capitol would like the least. But she may be right.
"Bet that's why I don't remember seeing it on television," she continues. "It's almost as bad as us and the berries!"
She starts laughing hysterically. She's right, there. He refused to play the game. When it came down to it, the last blow struck in the Quarter Quell was the girl's own fatal miss.
"Almost, but not quite," says a voice behind us, and we both jump, guiltily. It's Haymitch, just standing there, smirking at us. He's got a bottle of wine and takes a big drink of it. Well - we were the ones who broke the silent bargain of not watching his tape. So, I guess we can't complain about it.