Madge is a coiled spring as she watches Katniss take aim at the sky. Poised to snap. A white flash winds her creaking tight before the television screen blanks out. And she's left grasping onto that ghost of a moment like a pending sneeze that never comes. Replaced by a thousand-tone sack of dread dropping into the pit of her stomach. No. Oh no. Katniss. She fiddles with the television, switches it on and off again. The lights in her house go out and so do the streetlights outside her window. Voices rise in panic in the square. Jigsaw puzzle pieces click in her head.
"Dad! " Madge yells, shoes thumping up the steps to his office. Raised voices inside as he argues on the phone.
"... before you explain to those sodden bastards just what the hell is going-"
Goosebumps prickle on her skin. She tugs at his sleeve, soaked in sweat like his brow. Only to be dismissed with a hand in her face. Madge seethes with breaking patience and hurls herself upon the radio set in the corner. Its earpiece crackles with static the moment she cranes in to listen.
" Rapier 10 through 15, vector 145, angels 5-"
" Roger, Phoenix."
Hovercraft callsigns from the Phoenix airbase. Weeks of idly listening to radio chatter had piqued her interest as the Hovercrafts increased from two to five and now fifteen. Her hands fumble with a stack of maps before she finds one with Phoenix airbase. Spilling a box full of stationery until she finds a protractor.
145 degrees from the airbase would lead them directly to District 12. Fifteen hovercrafts. Probably loaded with bombs. Her heart plugs her throat.
" They're coming! " Madge screeches before she's even fully processed the information. Madge's father turns and puts a finger on his lips for silence.
"Don't you get it?" Madge yells at him, "They're coming to blow us to pieces !"
" Not now sweetie, I'm talking to the Capitol, please go check on your mother-"
Boiling rage sends her flying from the office. Her heart's on the verge of exploding.
"Mom!" Madge slams open her door so hard the wood splinters. Her mother's motionless as a corpse. Empty morphling vial on her nightstand. She usually doses before the games so she wouldn't have to hear a goddamned thing about kids dying.
Without another word, she hurtles back to the office, only to find its door locked in her face. Not opening despite her frantic pounding. All at once she feels like a canary in a coal mine. Tweeting and flapping its wings. Screaming for miners to get out the way from an impending gas explosion. To no avail. Her cotton dress flutters with the footsteps of her urgency and she throws herself down the steps to the first floor.
Her legs turn to stone when she hears a whistle in the distance. Sleet-white hands clutch the bannisters. She listens as the whistle pitches into a shriek. Dozens more join its dreadful song. Her eyes flutter shut, before the world roars with fire and noise and darkness drags her down into its cavernous abyss.
Madge is dust.
Born again into the likeness of white, silica powder. Her eyes are darkness. Swirling cesspools of chafing dryness that make her scream. Silence leaves her lips. She counts her heartbeats. A hundred. Two hundred. A thousand. Ten thousand heartbeats pass before pain burns her ribs and she sees a shadow pinning her down. It budges when she pushes at it. Each stuttery shove robbing her lungs and filling it back in equal measure.
When she finally gets it off. The void carved into her chest feels like an imploded mineshaft.
"Katniss, " Madge croaks. Stars flood her eyes and the hands drag her under once more.
Blood rises in her nostrils when she wakes. As though each bout of consciousness brings back another one of her senses. Smell. Sight.
Hearing?
She strains to listen for the slightest breath through the ringing in her ears. Silence drifts through the unmoving patchwork of brick and beam. Dad? Her eyes water as she imagines him crushed beneath the rafters. Telephone wire strangling his neck. Ceaseless voice still believing the Capitol would help them out of their ruin. Please, tell me you're up there. In the distance, thunder rumbles, confirming he's gone. Just like her mother, who left her life the moment the prison of her pain became too much to escape.
Tears fracture through her eyelids. Good. She tells herself.
They can wash away the dust.
Madge is a marionette. Hands and feet pulled by fiery threads when she sits upright. She winces. Ribs feel cracked. Throat parched with thirst. When she finally rises to her legs, the hollow strength in them barely hold her upright. Like the pillars propping up what's left of her home. Caved-in roof blocking the door and a brick wall collapsed over the kitchen's exit. She staggers through the dust. Wispy threads of dawnbreak like needles of light. Sight. She thinks. I can see.
Her eyes follow the little pink trails and she immediately regrets gaining back her sight. A red light. Blinking amidst broken roofing tiles right there in the living room. She drops to her knees, not even daring to touch the metal casing. Nearly missing the little inscriptions on its nameplate:
Mark 81 High-Explosive. Plinth Industries. Capitol, Panem.
"They bombed us," Madge swallows, another dose of hurt surging, "the Capitol bombed. Us. "
Its own citizens.
She would've thought this is no different than killing 23 children every year. Murder. The reality of it strikes her chest. They could've bombed any of the districts at any time for any reason. Because what happens when you give a government justification to kill its own children? You give them power to destroy a whole lot more. Without question, unchecked and unchallenged.
Madge flinches away from the dud like it's a canister of pure evil waiting to devour her whole. She tries the front door. The backdoor. Picks away at the pile of bricks, only to find an impenetrable wooden beam blocking her way. The stairs are smashed. Somewhere in the debris are the charred, dismemebered remnants of her parents. Her father's hands who held hers when he walked her to school for the first time. Her mother's eyes so full of depth and care before they shut away forever. Now probably lying in pieces with her schoolbooks and clothes and that wreck of a radio set she should've paid more attention to.
Her heart cracks. The walls start shifting on their own accord and she backs away from them. C'mon Madge, think, think. She helps herself to a leaking water pipe, each drop like an icy-cold jewel of bliss that quenches her bone-dry throat. Right before it flickers out. The brevity of its relief boils her insides and she rips the pipe from the ceiling. Coughing away the snowfall of dust.
Madge is a hunter now. Wincing at each footstep she makes towards the bomb. Each pop and crackle of broken debris beneath her feet raising the hairs on her neck. The red light stares back at her like a Jaguar's open jaws. I will get you, she seethes, or die trying. Locked in the Arena of her collapsed house with no escape. She jams the pipe beneath its casing, shuddering at the ping of metal on metal. Ears bracing with her arms as she heaves the immense weight on its side. Pausing at every metallic groan. Every little tick or tock that would end her life before she could scream.
No, no screaming today. No despair. She had to get out. If only to live long enough to discover what happened to Katniss.
It's slow going but she manages to edge the canister against the collapsed wall. Madge drops the pipe with a clang and stares at it. Still flickering its red glow of death. She slumps against a broken couch and looks at the welts from her blistered, bloodied hands. Caked in dust like the rest of her body. All she thinks about is Katniss's rough hands which only knew survival from the time her father died. Shame creeps beneath her face when she recalls those flippant words thrown her way. I would do it if I had to.
You have to. Now.
Her body screams for relief when she gets up. Parched throat demanding more water. The ache in her belly begging to be sated. Limbs desperate to be hurled into a pile of snow. None of these compare to her throbbing heart, longing for the sight of Katniss one more time. To fill that gaping void the wooden beam left on top of her. It is this longing that propels her into the kitchen to rip out the remnants of their coal-fired stove. Piling the lumps against the bomb together with splinters of wood from the fallen beams.
She finds a copy of Capitol Treatises in Governance and Theory - Coriolanus Snow. VII Edition. And immediately starts ripping out pages. Starting with the face of President Snow beneath the cover. Shredding it into tiny pieces like snowflakes and scattering them all around the metal casing.
It calms her, somewhat.
Not enough to keep her hands shaking as she tries twice, thrice to strike a match. Setting flame to her little pile of incendiaries and backing away once the fire catches. Her eyes water when the fire roars, baking the coals into a cherry-red glow. She watches. All the way from behind the ruins in the kitchen. Shutting her eyes and ears once the metallic canister burns pink.
Fear grips Madge by the lungs and she strains to breathe.
In the moments before her world shatters into shards of roaring fire again.
She clenches back at the feeling, wondering if Katniss felt the same way in her final moments.
