Chapter Twenty-Two
Before I can even settle into dreams, Katniss is shaking me awake, and I startle up, gripping my knife. "Get up - we have to move," she's saying.
I jump up, feeling vaguely alarmed, but there is no obvious danger. Everyone is grumbling at Katniss - including Johanna, who apparently changed her mind about staying awake.
"Listen - Wiress figured out the arena," says Katniss, exasperatedly. "So, we have to move. Look - the twelve spokes that go to the cornucopia. It's a clock. And each section of the arena -each wedge between the spokes - is triggered at a different time of day." She points across to the opposite beach. "You know how the wave came out of just that section of the jungle? That was about ten o'clock. The lightning just struck there - noon. The blood rain was next, after the lightning - 1 o'clock? The fog section was after the rain - I heard the rain, right before the fog started last night. And we're in the next section, where the monkeys are. That's why the fog ended and the monkeys retreated. We moved out of the fog segment - and the monkeys left when their hour was up."
I shade my eyes and look over at the cornucopia. It does make a certain kind of sense. I notice the cornucopia tail is pointed directly at what Katniss says is the twelve o'clock sector. "But are we safe from the different traps on the beach?" I ask. "The monkeys never went past the tree line."
"Some of them, maybe. I don't know. The wave doesn't stay in the jungle. What if the fog doesn't?"
"You're right. Anyway, it wouldn't hurt to keep ahead of the clock by a couple of hours, at least," I say.
"It sounds crazy to me," says Johanna, skeptically.
Katniss deliberately ignores her. She bends down to rouse Wiress.
"Come on, Beetee," I say, helping him up and back into his jumpsuit.
Wiress wakes up with a panicked, "Tick tock!"
"Yes, tick tock," says Katniss. "It's a clock, Wiress. You were right."
Wiress' face relaxes into a smile. "Midnight."
Katniss nods. "It starts at midnight." Then she frowns to herself.
"One-thirty," adds Wiress, looking up at the sky.
"Exactly. And at two, a terrible poisonous fog begins, there," Katniss confirms, pointing down the beach. "So, we have to move somewhere safe, now. Are you thirsty?"
She hands Wiress the bowl of water, and she gulps it down, and eats the last of the District 4 bread. Katniss goes over her weapons. I keep the extra bow, but she has both quivers now, and several knives. She wraps the spile and the skin medicine up in the parachute and ties it to her belt with a vine. I bend down and pick up an enormous leaf she brought out with her along with the moss and vines. Not that it matters too much if we're being tracked, but you never know. I fold it up and stick it beneath the belt.
Once we're ready, I bend down to pick up Beetee, but he objects. "Wire."
"She's right here - Wiress is fine. She's coming, too."
"Wire," Beetee insists.
"Oh, I know what he wants," says Johanna suddenly. She picks up the cylinder we took from Beetee when we bathed him. It's still coated in a heavy layer of dried blood. "This worthless thing. It's some kind of wire or something. That's how he got cut. Running up to the Cornucopia to get this. I don't know what kind of weapon it's supposed to be. I guess you could pull off a piece and use it as a garrote or something. But really, can you imagine Beetee garroting somebody?"
It's a long, somewhat convoluted insult, especially for blunt Johanna. I wonder if she's being deliberately obtuse or if she just can't help herself when it comes to tweaking Nuts and Volts. "He won his Games with wire," I say. "Setting up that electrical trap. It's the best weapon he could have."
"Seems like you'd have figured that out," Katniss adds. "Since you nicknamed him Volts and all."
Johanna glares at her. "Yeah, that was really stupid of me, wasn't it? I guess I must have been distracted by keeping your little friends alive. While you were … what again? Getting Mags killed off?"
Katniss' tension ruffles the air around her, and my own body reacts with a sense of springing alertness. I know she knows this, but I still want to shout her the warning - do not give Johanna the excuse to break this fragile alliance, not here and now.
"Go ahead," snarls Johanna, and I can't honestly tell if she's baiting her or is genuinely upset. "Try it. I don't care if you are knocked up, I'll rip your throat out," snarls Johanna.
"Maybe we all had better be careful where we step," says Finnick, smoothly, and his voice is both authoritative and calming. He takes the coil from Johanna and sets it on Beetee's chest. "There's your wire, Volts. Watch where you plug it."
Katniss takes a deep breath - and the moment passes. Everything in me tingles in relief - that was a little too much like the Career squabbling early on in the last Games.
I pick up Beetee, who clutches the wire. The extra rest has helped. I feel strong and fairly normal, except for the sore in my leg at the prosthesis. "Where to?"
"I'd like to go to the cornucopia," says Finnick. "And watch. Just to make sure we're right about the clock."
Katniss nods, but she has a troubled look. Despite the help that Finnick has been - and it's been enormous - she looks anxious about following his lead. At any moment, he could walk us into a trap - and the bickering on the beach must stand as a reminder that, at the end of the day, the Career alliance is always designed to break. But somehow, I don't think that Finnick will turn on us, yet. Not with the other Career alliance still intact.
We go over to the nearest sand spoke and walk down it to the Cornucopia. We're approaching it a little from the side, so we are careful when edging around to the opening, in case anyone has concealed themselves there. I put Beetee down in the shade and prop him against the horn, then I look around anxiously. Just like last year, although we have the numbers, being exposed in the center of the arena suddenly feels all kinds of vulnerable.
Beetee calls Wiress over and asks her to wash off the coil. She goes over to the water's edge and starts dunking it. She starts singing a quiet little song, at least for a minute. After a while, she stands up and points back down the way we came. "Two," she says.
Katniss shades her eyes to look down to the jungle. "Yes, look. Wiress is right. It's two o'clock and the fog has started."
We look and we, too, can see it, seeping out of the trees. "Like clockwork," I say. "You were very smart to figure that out, Wiress."
Wiress starts up her song again, and sits down to continue cleaning the wire. "Oh, she's more than smart, she's intuitive," says Beetee. "She can sense things before anyone else. Like a canary in one of your coal mines."
"What's that?" asks Finnick.
Katniss frowns. "It's a bird that we take down into the mines to warn us if there's bad air.
"What's it do - die?" asks Johanna.
"It stops singing first. That's when you should get out. But if the air's too bad, it dies, yes. And so do you."
I'm jolted back in time - to school, and our annual field trips down into the mines. I always felt sorry for those little yellow birds, lowered into the darkness. Especially since their warnings often come too late. If the miners hit a pocket of dangerous gas, the canary's death is usually only seconds before it is too late for them.
I shake off the image and concentrate on something else. I pull out the leaf I brought and spread it out on the ground. Using the tip of one of my smaller knives, I gently draw a circle, with a small circle inside it and twelve spokes radiating out of the inner circle to the edge of the larger one. Katniss comes over - she's gathered more arrows and is finding room for them in her quiver - and leans over me. "Look how the cornucopia's positioned," I point out.
"The tail points toward twelve," she says.
"Right, so this is the top of our clock," I say, scratching the numbers next to the spokes. "Twelve to one is the lightning zone." I label the wedge, then follow it up with the labels blood, fog and monkeys in the succeeding wedges.
"And ten to eleven is the wave," she reminds me, so I add this, too. "Did you notice anything unusual in the others?" she asks Johanna and Beetee. They shake their heads. "I guess they could hold anything."
"I'm going to mark the ones where we know the Gamemakers' weapon follows us out past the jungle, so we'll stay clear of those," I say, drawing lines through the fog and wave wedges. "Well - it's more than we knew this morning."
We're all silent for a moment, wondering what to do next - and just in time, a second before it is too late, we realize what the silence means. Katniss is fitting an arrow to her bow before she even turns toward where Wiress is. Was. Wiress is in Gloss' arms, her throat cut by the knife dripping in his hand. And then, there is an arrow in his skull and he falls back into the water. Johanna throws an axe at Cashmere and it finds its mark. The cannon sounds three times.
Brutus and Enobaria appear from the other side of the Cornucopia, and Brutus throws the spear toward me as I am still struggling to my feet. Finnick throws himself in front of it and knocks the spear away with his trident. He gets Enobaria's knife in his thigh and I jump up to make sure he's all right, just barely aware that Katniss and Johanna have leapt up to follow them as they dive back behind the Cornucopia. Then the island starts to spin.
I thrust my knife deep into the sand as the spinning increases in speed, and hold on to the hilt to keep myself from being sucked out over the side. Finnick slips past me and I grab his arm and cling to it, dizzily. The jungle circling us is just a blur of green. And then, as suddenly as we began, we stop.
"Katniss!" I stumble to my feet - I have to steady myself a second until my vision stops spinning - and run over to the other side of the cornucopia, where Katniss and Johanna are getting up, dizzy but unharmed.
"Where's Volts?" asks Johanna.
"There!" Finnick, hobbling over to join us, points out into the water. "I'll get him," he says, and unhesitatingly dives into the lake.
"Wiress!" chokes Katniss. She runs over to the water's edge and looks around for Wiress' body. "The wire," she explains to me. "Cover me." She throws her weapons to the ground and dives into the water, where Wiress' body has floated away in the wake of the spinning island. I pick up the bow and arrow - although, in terms of "covering" her, there's not much I can do there. Johanna and I just watch helplessly as she knifes through the water.
"Where'd your girlfriend learn to swim?" asks Johanna. I just shrug. It's a good question - though, I'm really not surprised. What Katniss doesn't know about surviving in nature - I have yet to find out.
The hovercraft appears just as Katniss reaches Wiress' body. We watch her wrench the coil out of the woman's final grip as first Gloss, then Cashmere, are lifted out of the arena. Then, Katniss swims away and the hovercraft claw descends for Wiress. The five of us gather again at the cornucopia, breathing hard - as much with the rapidity of the recent events as the labor. Beetee takes the coil from Katniss and, now that it has been washed clean of the blood that coated it, we see that it is a very fine gold wire, not much thicker than hair.
Katniss looks from Beetee to Johanna and then Finnick, and at last she looks at me. I give her a small smile and she comes over and wraps her arms around me.
"Let's get off this stinking island," says Johanna, but it's without her usual venom. There was something fragile about Wiress that makes her death every bit as somber as Mags'. Everyone collects their weapons, and Finnick strips off his undershirt to wrap around the wound in his thigh. Katniss helps Beetee to his feet and he confirms that he can walk now.
"Let's head to the twelve o'clock beach," Katniss says. "That gives us a lot of hours without traps, and nothing leeching out onto that beach."
We all agree, and then Finnick, Johanna and I each turn toward a different spoke.
"Twelve o'clock, right?" I say. "The tail points at twelve."
"Before they spun us," argues Finnick. "I was judging by the sun."
"The sun only tells you it's going on four, Finnick," Katniss points out.
Finnick and I squint at her, and then Beetee says, "I think Katniss' point is, knowing the time doesn't necessarily mean knowing where four is on the clock. You might have a general idea of the direction. Unless you consider that they may have shifted the outer ring of jungle, as well."
Looking around, it's unfortunately true. There's a depressing uniformity to the jungle, too, that I didn't notice before. The twelve o'clock wedge had a tall tree in the middle of the wedge, but there is a similarly tall tree in each section.
"Yes," says Katniss. "So, any one of these paths could lead to twelve o'clock."
"Should we follow Brutus and Enobaria's tracks?" asks Johanna.
"They were washed or swept away when the land was spun," says Finnick.
"I should have never mentioned the clock," Katniss says. "Now they've taken that advantage away as well."
"Only temporarily," Beetee reassures her. "At ten, we'll see the wave again and be back on track."
"Yes, they can't redesign the whole arena," I add, thinking, hopefully we've figured out where the ten o'clock wedge is by then. But I smile encouragingly at Katniss. (Who will turn first? I wonder fretfully. Finnick or Johanna? Will they act in concert? Who will they target first - me or Katniss? Where does that leave Beetee in the mix?)
"It doesn't matter," Johanna breaks through my thoughts. "You had to tell us or we never would have moved our camp in the first place, brainless." Katniss actually smiles at this. "Come on, I need water. Anyone have a good gut feeling?"
We end up following one of the spokes near the tail, after all. We cautiously walk up the beach to peer curiously in the jungle, looking for any sign of an active trap.
"Well," I say. "It must be monkey hour and I don't see any of them in there. I'm going to try to tap a tree."
"No, it's my turn," says Finnick.
A shiver crawls down my spine. What is this? At no point have we been taking turns. "I'll at least watch your back," I say, slowly.
"Katniss can do that," says Johanna. "We need you to make another map. The other washed away." She pulls a leaf off of a tree and as she does, I look over at Katniss, whose suspicions are clear in her lowered eyebrows. But, she looks over at me and just shrugs.
The leaf Johanna picked is smaller than one I used earlier, but I just draw the circles in again, my thoughts preoccupied. It's become something of a pattern, I think. Finnick approaching Katniss at the tribute parade and in the training center. Johanna also approaching me in both places. Now they both seem to be trying to keep Katniss and me within their individual sights - and to be working in collusion, no less. If they are still working on Haymitch's instructions, perhaps they are just trying to put off the moment Katniss inevitably decides to split off from this alliance. But it's clumsily done. And whatever Haymitch's intentions, it's not possible that Finnick and Johanna - who have an understanding of some kind, that much at least is clear - will retain the alliance until the very end. It might be too early - although, maybe not. We've halved the Career pack. There are now just four other tributes out there - Brutus, Enobaria, Chaff and - one other person, whom I can't even recall. It would make a certain sense to eliminate us now, before we're expecting it, and - now that they know a good portion of how the jungle works, take their chances, jointly, on the rest.
It occurs to me that, hunched on the ground, my knife preoccupied, I'm not in the most defensible position. And just as I straighten, there is a scream from within the jungle.
"Katniss!"