Chapter Twenty-One

I wake to Katniss' screams.

"Run!" she shouts. "Run!"

I sense movement to my left - Finnick jumping up and picking up Mags with one swift motion. My limbs are moving very slowly - I feel more sluggish than I should. I grab my knife, struggle to my feet, and am yanked forward by Katniss before I can even process what is going on. We stumble into the trees, following Finnick. "What is it? What is it?"

"Some kind of fog. Poisonous gas. Hurry, Peeta!" she cries in panic.

I glance back and see a wall of misty fog heading straight towards us - moving with unnatural speed. Then I trip on some vines.

Katniss keeps me from stumbling to the ground and she takes my hand. "Watch my feet. Just try to step where I step."

I nod mutely and do as she says. But we can't outrun the fog. When it touches the heel of my good foot, I understand what she means by poisonous. I feel a sharp burning sensation, and a numbing pain crawl up my ankle, so now it feels like I am running on two artificial feet. This confuses the prosthetic leg, which over time I have trained to follow the motions of the other. It catches on some vines and I fall on my face. I try to call out for Katniss to go, to leave me, but I can't move my mouth.

"Peeta -" she begins, then screams and clutches her arm.

She yanks me right up and after her, and I get tangled up in her feet and we both almost go down. As I straighten up, I see that her arms are twitching. And my feet will not go in the same direction as each other. Katniss wedges her shoulder under my right arm and pulls me forward. We've caught up to Finnick, who has stopped to wait for us, and when I look back, the fog is a little further behind us, but still coming.

"I'll have to carry him," says Finnick. "Can you take Mags?"

"Yes."

Finnick heaves me on his back and puts one of his tridents in my hand. Everything from there on out is like a nightmare. I cling to Finnick's back - slowing him down. Mags clings to Katniss - slowing her down. Or the world has slowed down. My mind feels like it is filled with the fog, and that I'm floating.

Katniss cries out and Finnick stops. "Come on, Katniss!"

We move again, but a second time, a third, Finnick stops and calls out to Katniss.

"It's no use," I hear her say. "Can you take them both? Go on ahead, I'll catch up."

"No, I can't carry them both. My arms aren't working. I'm sorry, Mags."

Vaguely, I'm aware of Mags standing straight and coming over to Finnick. She reaches up to his face and kisses him, then turns around to walk right into the approaching fog.

I hear the cannon, though it's muffled by the fogginess in my head.

"Finnick?" cries Katniss, but he is turning away, leaving her, running again through the trees.

And then, without warning, he collapses to the ground, twitching. I land on top of him. And Katniss falls on top of me.

In the silence that precedes our certain death by poison, Finnick moans once and Katniss manages to push herself off of us. She says, "It's stopped. It's stopped."

I turn my head and look up in time to see the fog, which is now a dense wall, rise up and evaporate into the night air. I roll off of Finnick, and he manages to roll over, but his whole body is twitching. A flash of orange in the moonlit trees catches my eye, and I squint up to see it - a furry creature perched up in the tree. It's not a rat or a squirrel. It squats, child-sized, and not unlike in form. With the faintest rustle, another one joins the first to look down at me.

I didn't think such things existed for real - at least, not anymore. "Monkeys," I say, pointing.

After we all spend a couple of minutes staring at each other, I test my muscles. I find I can crawl, which is good, because it is unlikely I will be able to walk. Looking around, I see that Finnick led us close to the water, and that seems like a good place to go. Katniss and Finnick follow, and we struggle down until we've reached the beach.

The touch of the water hurts - stings even worse than the poisons. But after the initial sting, there is some relief. And where my skin has blistered from the touch of the poison, a milky substance escapes into the water. That seems encouraging. Looking over, I see that Katniss seems to have discovered the same, as she has taken off her jumpsuit and is dunking and scrubbing one limb at a time. I follow her lead. The suit is useless now, completely full of holes. Down to one layer - the soft cotton shorts and shirt - I'm as comfortable in the warm air here as I'm ever likely to be, anyway. Katniss puts the purple flotation belt back on and so do I.

Wordlessly, Katniss and I turn to Finnick, who has not followed us into the water. He seems worse than I ever felt. Katniss pours handfuls of water on him, while I cut away his wasted jumpsuit. Then I find some shells to carry water. His pained moans at the touch of the salt water pierce the quiet air and we both glance toward the water and the shadow of the Cornucopia, nervously.

"We've got to get more of him into the water," Katniss whispers.

We grab his feet and turn him around so that we can get him feet-first into the water. Slowly, bit-by-bit, we pull him further into the water, until finally we have him immersed to his neck.

"There's just your head left, Finnick," I tell him softly. "That's the worst part, but you'll feel much better after, if you can bear it."

Katniss and I hold his hands as he dunks his face.

"I'm going to tap a tree," Katniss says.

"Let me make the hole first," I tell her. "You stay with him. You're the healer."

She looks reluctant, but I rise and head back up the beach before she can object. I only go a little way into the trees before I find a nice, big one. Mags had the awl, and presumably took it into the fog with her, so I have to chip and dig into the tree with a sharp corner of my machete blade. It's awkward going, but I've almost got a solid hole, when Katniss' voice makes me jump.

"Peeta, I need your help with something."

"OK, just a minute, I think I've just about got it. Yes, there. Have you got the spile?"

"I do. But we've found something you'd better take a look at. Only, move toward us quietly, so you don't startle it."

I turn slowly to her, alerted by her tone to some trouble. I don't see anything but her and Finnick standing just inside the tree line, weapons out. "OK," I say. I take careful steps toward them and I can see Katniss wincing at the sound of my footfalls. Finnick is looking past me, slightly over my shoulder, and I'm tingling to look behind me to see what the danger is, but I resist the temptation. But there's another one of those orange flashes above my head and I glance up automatically.

There's a screech and, in a split second, a mass of orange bodies descends on me. Before I can even think about it, I swing my knife above me, defensively, and a mutt - for that's what it must be - is impaled on it.

Katniss and Finnick run up to me and her arrows and his trident join the battle. Wherever I swing, I hit a mutt. I hear Katniss' arrows whiz past my ears and hit target after target.

We form a triangle, backs to each other, a few yards apart, and as the numbers decrease, we are able to move further apart, pushing them back from us.

"Peeta!" screams Katniss. "Your arrows!"

I turn and see that Katniss is out of arrows and has just one of her small knives out. I still have a spare bow and quiver. I start pushing the quiver off of my left shoulder. Katniss gives another cry, and I look up to see a mutt flying straight toward me. Katniss is jumping toward me, with I think the intention of throwing herself between me and the mutt and I can't untangle my knife fast enough to defend the both of us….

Then, out of nowhere, out of the shadows of the trees behind me, the morphling woman steps out and in front of me, her arms open wide as the mutt lands on her and sinks its fangs into her chest.

Fuck!

I don't know if I scream it out loud or only think it. In a frenzy, I finish pushing the quiver off of me and plunge the machete into the mutt's back. Then again in the neck. And again. Until it finally releases its jaws from the woman.

"Come on then! Come on!" I scream at the mutts. But no more are coming. They are, in fact, withdrawing. Slouching back into the trees. As if, by making the kill, they have carried out their mission and are being called away.

"Get her," Katniss tells me. "We'll cover you."

The morphling is light in my arms as I carry her down to the beach. She's not dead yet. But her breathing is raspy and coarse. I lay her on the sand near the water and stare at her thin, gaunt face in the moonlight. She grabs at me and I take one of her hands. "It's OK," I tell her, emptily.

Katniss joins me and cuts away the wetsuit at her chest, and we can see the deep puncture wounds and the dark blood staining her undershirt. She takes the woman's other hand and looks at me, shaking her head. I thought as much.

"I'll watch the trees," says Finnick.

I can feel all the bones in the woman's hand. What a horrifying waste of a life. How many years did she enjoy - if that's the right word - the fruits of her victory before sliding into this state? Or maybe she was happier there, in that twilight world? Content to just take her drugs and do her painting.

I stroke her brittle hair. "With my paint box at home, I can make every color imaginable. Pink as pale as a baby's skin. Or as deep as rhubarb. Green like spring grass. Blue that shimmers like ice on water."

The woman stares into my eyes. I sense Katniss looking at me, as well. But I understand people who think in colors.

"One time, I spent three days mixing paint until I found the right shade for sunlight on white fur. You see, I kept thinking it was yellow, but it was much more than that. Layers of all sorts of color. One by one."

She wiggles her hand out of mine and swirls a finger in the blood pooling on her chest.

"I haven't figured out a rainbow, yet," I continue, my head exploding with colors - my heart aching for the paints I will never return to. I wasn't done yet. "They come so quickly and leave so soon. I never have enough time to capture them. Just a bit of blue here or purple there. And then they fade away again. Back into the air."

I hold her eyes, even as she lifts her hand and swirls my cheek with her blood, in a finger-painting motion.

"Thank you. That looks beautiful."

For just a second, lucidity returns to the woman's eyes. A smile returns to her face. In the fading light of her life, you can catch a glimpse of the girl she was before her reaping. She makes a small sound, as if an answer to me. But her hand falls and the cannon sounds.

After a moment, I carry her out into the water and let her float away from us. The hovercraft to take her out of the arena won't appear if we are too close, and this beach is narrow, and the jungle too dangerous. I sit down next to Katniss and watch until the hovercraft appears, lowers a heavy claw, and plucks the morphling out of the water. I wish I knew her name. And why she sacrificed herself for me.

Finnick rejoins us and hands Katniss the arrows, which he has collected from the jungle. She washes them off and then goes back up toward the trees. Right after she enters the trees, there is a strange, snaky sound, and Finnick and I stand up in alarm. The floor of the jungle seems to writhe around for a little, the vines moving on their own. It's so reminiscent of my tracker jacker hallucinations that I experience a moment of dizziness. Then the strange movement ends and everything is back to normal, except that the orange monkey corpses have disappeared.

Katniss comes back down to the beach with a clump of moss to dry her arrows. When she asks where the monkeys went, Finnick and I just look at each other.

"We don't know exactly. The vines shifted and they were gone," he explains.

We stand, looking at the jungle with wary eyes. I notice suddenly that my hands are itching and, looking down, see that my arms and hands are covered with tiny little scabs. Probably the wounds from the fog drops healing over, but very annoying. I reach up to my face and I can feel them there too. I look over at the others and see we are all taken with the same realization.

"Don't scratch," says Katniss, sternly. "You'll only bring infection. Think it's safe to try for the water again?"

This time, the three of us go back to the tree I had just finished tapping. I wriggle the spile into the tree, and this one gushes forth. There must be gallons of water inside it. We both drink our fill and wash our itching faces. I run back to find the shells we used on Finnick and we fill them up to take back to the beach.

Back on the beach, Katniss squints up at the moon, as if trying to figure out what time it is. "Why don't you two get some rest?" she says. "I'll watch for a while."

"No, Katniss, I'd rather," says Finnick, with a slight choke to his voice. He's thinking about Mags.

"All right, Finnick, thanks," she says. By the warmth in her voice, she's undergone a sea change in terms of her trust in him. This will make things difficult later on, but there's definitely no way Katniss and I would have survived the last two encounters on our own.

I have a long, long sleep in which even the nightmares seem exhausted and fade away before they can scare me awake. The last thing I remember dreaming about is of the Remake Center, and my prep team has put some kind of lotion on me and my whole body is turning red and itchy.

"Peeta. Peeta, wake up." Her beautiful voice - strangely cheerful, like a morning bird.

I blink my eyes open, and I see two faces staring at me close up. They are green-skinned monstrosities, crusted over with gray scabs. I jump up with a shout, knocking over a mat that was shading my head.

Finnick and Katniss fall backward in the sand, laughing hysterically. And continue to laugh like toddlers every time they pause and see me frowning at them. They don't stop until a parachute drifts down to land in front of us, and I pick it up. It contains a small loaf of bread. Tinted green from seaweed - District 4 bread. I hand it to Finnick and he turns it over in his hands.

"This will go well with the shellfish," he says, and I see that he's been busy. Besides the mat, he's woven more baskets and filled them with shellfish - oysters, small crabs and mussels, if I remember right. I've only ever had seafood in the Capitol.

"Come on, Peeta," says Katniss. "Haymitch sent us some lotion for the scabs. See, you've been itching in your sleep. You'll get an infection and -."

"Yes, yes - blood poisoning," I finish. "I remember," I add with a grin. The ointment smells like tar and pine, and it smears on my skin an unattractive brown-green color. But it numbs the skin enough to make the itching go away. Katniss rubs it on the exposed parts of my arms and neck, then takes a little too much delight in making me close my eyes and painting it on my face. She hands me the jar so I can do my legs, and she's grinning at me.

"What?"

"Your eyes are the same."

I cock my head at her, puzzled.

"Just like when you were in the mud."

"Oh," I reply, blushing for some reason that I can't even understand – but my blush is hidden behind the ointment.

We feast on Finnick's bread and shellfish. Afterward, I notice Katniss again studying the sky, trying to figure out the time. Studying the trees, trying to figure out the jungle. There has been no sign on all this ring of beach or at the cornucopia of any other tributes. So, they all seem to be keeping to the jungle. The jungle, which seems rigged with multiple traps. Following along with her thoughts, I watch her absently pick up a handful of sand and let it stream out between her fingers. If we could stay on the beach - if we could defend ourselves here - this would be an ideal place to stay. That's what she's thinking. Especially if the jungle is doing the unpleasant job of killing tributes for us.

At that, there is a shimmering, humming, from the jungle on the other side of the cornucopia from us. One small section of trees is vibrating - and then there is a scream. We jump to our feet as a wave of water appears to crest the hill - where we know the force field meets the jungle - and comes roaring downhill. The wave of water hits the salt lake and the lake boils up in a surf that is strong enough to reach our own little beach on the opposite side. The water engulfs the beach and rises as high as our knees, before it recedes. Our camp starts floating away and we hurry to collect everything we want to save - Finnick's mats and baskets, the little jar of ointment, our water-collecting shells, our weapons. The chemical-laced wetsuits and the remnants of our shellfish meal float away, useless to anyone now.

A cannon fires and whoever was caught up in the wave on the far side of us is picked up by the hovercraft. "Twelve," says Katniss softly. We're half down.

We set everything up again on the damp sand and I sit down and start rubbing my knee and down to the prosthetic.

"Do you need to take it off for a while?"

I shake my head. "No - it's just a little uncomfortable. But it's not worth it, in case we have to move in a hurry." I resist the temptation to make a joke about how little it's going to matter in a few days. Then distract myself by wondering if I will be buried with or without it.

Katniss stiffens. "There," she hisses, nodding down the beach.

I look over and see that three people - or something - have stumbled out onto the beach a couple hundred yards down from us. One is dragging a second out onto the beach and the third is walking around in dizzy circles. The weird thing is that they are all solid red in color, which makes them look like someone dumped buckets of paint on them. "Who is that? Or what? Muttations?"

Katniss fits an arrow to her bow. We watch as the person being dragged collapses to the sand and the dragger stamps the ground and shoves the third down to the sand.

Finnick stirs. "Johanna!" he cries, and runs down the beach.

"Finnick!" It's definitely her.

Katniss looks at me, and her look is fully exasperated. "What now?" she asks.

"We can't really leave Finnick," I reply.

Katniss muses over this for a moment, as if seriously considering ditching Finnick now and dragging me off into the trees. "Guess not," she finally says, grumpily. "Come on, then." She stamps off down the beach and I follow her, thinking, well she didn't like Finnick at first, either. "She's got Wiress and Beetee."

"Nuts and Volts? I've got to hear how this happened."

When we reach them, Beetee is lying on the sand, Wiress is walking in circles and Johanna is gesticulating excitedly as she talks to Finnick. "We thought it was rain, you know, because of the lightning, and we were all so thirsty. But when it started coming down, it turned out to be blood. Thick, hot blood. You couldn't see, you couldn't speak without getting a mouthful. We just staggered around, trying to get out of it. That's when Blight hit the force field."

"I'm sorry, Johanna," says Finnick.

"Yeah well, he wasn't much, but he was from home," she replies shortly. "And he left me alone with these two." She nudges Beetee with her foot. "He got a knife in the back at the cornucopia. And her-."

We look at Wiress, who murmurs. "Tick tock, tick tock."

"Yeah, we know. Tick tock. Nuts is in shock," Johanna says, rolling her eyes. Wiress wanders over and bumps into her, and she shoves her away from her, knocking Wiress to the ground. "Just stay down, will you?"

Katniss, who has been tense throughout all of this, suddenly snaps. "Lay off her."

Johanna narrows her eyes. "Lay off her?" She steps up and slaps Katniss, hard. I grab Katniss before she reacts - her arm is reaching automatically behind her for an arrow. And Finnick steps up to Johanna. "Who do you think got them out of that bleeding jungle for you? You-." Finnick tosses her over his shoulder as if she weighs no more than Mags, and carries her out into the water. "You pampered, painted bitch!" The rest of Johanna's insults are lost to us as she is dunked, repeatedly.

"Are you OK?"

"What did she mean? She got them for me?"

I shake my head. "I don't know. You did want them originally." I don't say so, but this must be more of Haymitch's work.

"Yeah, I did. Originally. But I won't have them long, unless we do something."

I lift Beetee and Katniss pulls Wiress up and we take them back down the beach to our little camp. I take a look at Beetee's knife wound, while Katniss sets Wiress down in the shallows. Then Katniss joins me, and purses her lips. She unhooks his belt and removes a heavy cylinder attached to it with a rope of vines. She tosses it up the sand. "Let's get him to the water."

We hold him down in the shallows and scrub the blood out of his hair and off his wetsuit. When we remove it, we find his underclothes saturated with blood, as well. Katniss gives a sigh and glances at me. I smile – thinking of her reluctance to strip me in the arena last year - and pull off his shorts, while she pulls off his shirt. She puts Beetee's clothes in the water, under a rock so they can soak without floating away, then goes to get Finnick's mat. We lift Beetee onto it and she examines his back. There's a long gash running from his shoulder blades to his middle back.

"It's not too deep," she says, "nothing vital was punctured. But he's lost a lot of blood." She looks out over the water, then back towards the jungle. "Be right back."

I watch her run into the trees - not too far, I can still see her. She comes back out with an armful of moss and some vines and I sit back and watch her, fascinated, as she pads the moss over his wound and secures it with vines. My memory of her doctoring me in the last arena is vague, at best, and from a different perspective. She wordlessly points to our shells, and I collect some water in them and bring them back to her and prop Beetee up while she coaxes him to drink. Then we bring him up out of the water and set him in the shade at the edge of the trees.

"I think that's all we can do," she says.

"It's good. You're good with this healing stuff," I say, feeling more than a little in awe of her. "It's in your blood."

"No," she says, as always denying this. "I got my father's blood. I'm going to see about Wiress."

I collect more water as she goes back down to the lake and starts scrubbing Wiress down with another piece of moss, and helping her strip her blood-soaked clothes. And I think - this is what she would be, if our world wasn't so fucked up. She hunts from necessity. It's not what she was meant to do. Because even though she hasn't made a study of it, even though she blanches at pus and pauses before being able to look at a naked body, even a wounded one - the instinct is in her.

Finnick and Johanna join us - Johanna in her underclothes, which makes her look somewhat less threatening. I eye Katniss warily as she returns with Wiress, also newly clean and redressed. I hand Johanna one of the shells of water.

"Thanks, Lover Boy," she says to me with a wink. Katniss' eyes narrow and Finnick hastily passes a basket of shellfish her way. Katniss takes the other basket and tries unsuccessfully to get Wiress to eat.

"What happened to Mags?" asks Johanna directly.

Finnick coughs, then proceeds to recount our overnight adventures - the fog, the monkeys. He doesn't mention specifically how Mags died, just that she didn't make it. Johanna narrows her eyes, but doesn't ask for an elaboration.

"We should rest," says Katniss.

"I don't need it," says Johanna abruptly. "I'll keep watch."

Katniss rolls her eyes. She's not going to trust Johanna with a watch by herself.

"I slept in, I can keep watch," I volunteer.

Katniss shakes her head. "I slept in almost as much. You still haven't got a full rest since the force field." She avoids my eyes, so I don't know if it's that she's worried about me being overpowered by Johanna or if she's rankled over the "Lover Boy" comment. She is right, though, I'm still tired. And my left leg is sore in a very problematic way. I can tell by her face that she's not to be argued with - if I know her, she's not only going to try to figure out Johanna, but also rethink her own strategy with the new wrinkle of our suddenly-crowded allegiance. With twelve tributes left, suddenly our pack is half of the field.

"Fine," I concede.

Finnick has already stretched out in the shade near Beetee, and I find a nearby spot and lie down, clutching my knife. Katniss comes over to me and kneels over me for a moment, staring down at me before - almost grudgingly - bending down to kiss my cheek.

"Be nice," I whisper.

"Be good and sleep - Lover Boy," she whispers back.