A clock. I can almost see the hands ticking around the twelve-sectioned face of the arena. Each hour begins a new horror, a new Gamemaker weapon, and ends the previous. Lightning, blood rain, fog, monkeys — those are the first four hours on the clock. At ten, the wave. I don't know what happens in the other seven, but I know that Wiress is right.
At present, the blood rain's falling and we're on the beach below the monkey segment, far too close to the fog for my liking. Do the various attacks stay within the confines of the jungle? Not necessarily. The wave didn't. If that fog leaches out of the jungle, or the monkeys return...
"Get up," I hear Katniss order, knocking me out of my thoughts. Peeta, Finnick, Nolan, and Johanna awake. "Get up — we have to move." There's enough time, though, to explain the clock theory to them. About Wiress's tick-tocking and how the movements of the invisible hands trigger a deadly force in each setion.
I think she has convinced everyone who's conscious except Johanna, who's naturally opposed to liking anything Katniss suggests. But even she agrees it's better to be safe than sorry.
While the others collect our few possessions and get Beetee back into his jumpsuit, I help Katniss rouse Wiress. She awakes with a panicked "tick, tock!"
"Yes, tick, tock, the arena's a clock. It's a clock, Wiress, you were right," I say. "You were right."
Relief floods her face — I guess because somebody has finally understood what she's known probably from the first tolling of the bells. "Midnight."
"It starts at midnight," Katniss confirms.
A memory struggles to surface in my brain. I see a clock. No, it's a watch, resting in Plutarch Heavensbee's palm. "It starts at midnight," Plutarch said. In retrospect, it's like he was giving me a clue about the arena. I wonder if he gave Katniss the save clue because she seems lost in thought as well.
Wiress nods at the blood rain. "One-thirty," she says.
"Exactly. One-thirty. And at two, a terrible posionous fog begins there," I say, pointing at the nearby jungle. "So we have to move somewhere safe now." She smiles and stands up obediently.
"Are you thirsty?" Katniss hands her the woven bowl and she gulps down about a quart. Finnick gves her the last bit of the bread and she gnaws on it. With the inability to communicate overcome, she's functioning again.
I check my weapons. Katniss ties up the spile and the tube of medicine in the parachute and fixes it to her belt with a vine.
Beetee's stil pretty out of it, but when Peeta tries to lift him, he objects. "Wire," he says.
"She's right here," Peeta tells him. "Wiress is fine. She's coming, too."
But still Beetee struggles. "Wire," he insists.
"Oh, I know what he wants," says Johanna impatiently. She crosses the beach and picks up the cylinder we took from his belt when we were bathing him. It's coated in a thick layer of congealed 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?"
"He won his Games with wire. Setting up that electrical trap," says Peeta. "It's the best weapon he could have."
I can see that Katniss is growing suspicious of Johanna. But she can't know the real purpose that Beetee has for the coil. "Seems like you'd have figured that out," she says. "Since you nicknamed him Volts and all."
Johanna's eyes narrow at Katniss dangerously. "Yeah, that was really stupid of me, wasn't is?" she says. I glance up at Nolan, hoping he jumps in and stops her."I guess I must have been distracted by keeping you little friends alive. While you were ... what, again? Getting Mags killed off?"
I wince at her words and was fixing to tell her to stop it when Katniss tightens her grip on the knife handle on her belt.
"Go ahead. Try it. I don't care if you are knocked up, I'll rip your throat out," says Johanna.
I know that Johanna was in on protecting Katniss and Peeta, so I knew that she wouldn't actually kill her, but it still made me nervous. Eventually, Finnick comes back, breaking apart their stare down. "Maybe we all better be careful where we step," says Finnick, shooting me a look. He takes the coil and sets it on Beetee's chests. "There's your wire, Volts. Watch where you plug it."
Peeta picks up the now-unresisting Beetee. "Where to?"
"I'd like to go to the Cornucopia and watch. Just to make sure we're right about the clock," says Finnick. It seems as good a plan as any. Besides, I wouldn't mind the chance of going over the weapons again. And there are eight of us now. Even if you count Beetee and Wiress out, we've got six good fighters. It's so different from where I was in my first Games. It's great to have allies as long as you can ignore the thought that you'll have to kill them. But not this time.
We walk down the nearest sand strip, approaching the Cornucopia with care, just in case the Careers are concealed in there. I doubt they are, because we've been on the beach for hours and there's been no sign of life. The area's abandoned, as I expected. Only the big golden horn and the picked-over pile of weapons remain.
When Peeta lays Beetee in the bit of shade the Cornucopia provided, he calls out to Wiress. She crouches beside him and puts the coil of wire in her hands. "Clean it, will you?" he asks.
Wiress nods and scampers over to the water's edge, where she dunks the coil in the water. She starts quietly singing some funny little song, about a mouse running up a clock. It must be for children, but it seems to make her happy.
"Oh, not that song again," says Johanna, rolling her eyes. "That went on for hours before she started tick-tocking."
Suddenly Wiress stands up very straight and points to the jungle. "Two," she says.
I follow her finger to where the wall of fog has just begun to seep out onto the beach. "Yes, look, Wiress is right. It's two o'clock and the fog has started."
"Like clockwork," says Peeta. "You were very smart to figure that out, Wiress."
Wiress smiles and goes back to singing and dunking her coil. "Oh, she's more than smart," says Beetee. "She's intuitive." We all turn to look at Beetee, who seems to be coming back to life. "She can sense things before anyone else. Like a canary in one of your coal mines."
"What's that?" Finnick asks Katniss.
"It's a bird that we take down into the mines to warn us if there's bad air," she says.
"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." Katniss explains.
Despite her annoyance at Wiress, Johanna's as happy as I've seen her in the arena. While me and Katniss are adding to our stock of arrows, she pokes around until she comes up with a paril of lethal-looking axes. It would be a bad choice for me, but seeing her throw one with such force it sticks in the sun-softened gold of the Cornucopia. It makes sense that she would be good with axes though. She's from District 7. Lumber.
While I've been messing around with the weapons, Peeta's been squatting on the ground, drawing something with the tip of his knife on a large, smooth leaf he brought from the jungle. I look over his shoulder and see he's creating a map of the arena. In the center is the Cornucopia on its circle of sand with twelve strips branching out from it. It looks like a pie slice into twelve equal wedges. There's another circle represtning the waterline and a slightly larger one indicating the edge of the jungle. "Look how the Cornucopia's postiotioned," he says to me and Katniss.
I examine the Cornucopia and see what he means. "The tail points towards twelve o'clock," I say.
"Right, so this is the top of our clock," he says, and quickly scratches the numbers one through twelve around the clock face. "Twelve is the lightning zone." He writes lightning in tiny print in the corresponding wedge, then works clockwise adding blood, fog, and monkeys in the following sections.
"And ten to eleven is the wave," Katniss says. He adds it. Finnick and Johanna and Nolan join us at this point, armed to the teeth with tridents, axes, and knives.
"Did you notice anything unusual in the others?" I ask Johanna, Beetee, and Nolan, since they might have seen something we didn't. But all they've seen is a lot of blood. "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," says Peeta, drawing diagional lines on the fog and wave beaches. Then he sits back. "Well, it's a lot more than we knew this morning, anyway."
We all nod in agreement, and that's when I notice it. The silence. Our Canary has stopped singing.
Katniss has the same instict as me as we both load an arrow and I twist and get a glimpse of a dripping-wet Gloss letting Wiress slide to the ground, her throat slit in a bright red smile. The point of my arrow disappears into her right temple, and in the instannt it takes to rolaod, Johanna has buried her ax blade in Cashmere's chest. Finnick knocks away a spear Brutus throws at Peeta and takes Enobaria's knife in his thigh. If there wasn't a Cornucopia to duck behind, they'd be dead, both the tributes from District 2. Katniss springs forward in pursuit. Boom! Boom! Boom! The cannon confrims there's no way to help Wiress, no need to finish off Gloss or Cashmere. The seven of us round the horn, starting to give chase to Brutus and Enobaria, who are sprinting down a sand strip toward the jungle.
Enobaria stops and throws her knife with perfect accuracy at Peeta. Nolan acts so quickly and jumps in front of him. The knife hits Nolan. I don't have time to see where it hit him before the ground jerks beneath my feet and I'm flung on my side in the sand. The circle of land that holds the Cornucopia starts spinning fast, really fast, and I can see the jungle going by in a blur. I feel the centrifugal force pulling me toward the water and I dig my hands and feet into the sand, trying to get some purchase on the unstable ground. Between the flying sand and the dizziness, I have to squeeze my eyes shut. There is literally nothing I can do but hold on until, with no deceleration, we slame to a stop.
Coughing and queasy, I sit up slowly to find my companions in the same condition. Finnick, Johanna, Peeta, and Katniss have hung on. The three dead bodies have been tossed out into the seawater.
The whole thing, from missing Wiress's song to now, can't have taken more than a minute or two. We sit there panting, scraping the sand out of our mouths.
"Where's Volts?" says Johanna. We're on our feet. My mind wanders to Nolan rather than to Beetee. One wobbly circle of the Cornucopia confirms their gone. Finnick spots Beetee about twenty yards out in the water, barely keeping afloat, and swims out to haul him in.
Everyone goes to him but my eyes continue to scan the beach and water for Nolan. I finally spot him washed up on the beach. I quickly make my way over to him, swimming through the water as fast as I could.
Fear instantly rises up inside of me as I approach him. "Nolan?" I say as I croach down beside him. He opens his eyes to look up at me. I want to ask him why he did that, but I know the answer already. He did it for the rebellion. Katniss and Peeta need to live. Tears seep out of my eyes involuntarily. "I'm sorry." I tell him.
He smiles up at me. "It will be okay, Ember. Remember, remember who the real enemy is." he says, repeating what Haymitch had told us before the Games. He has tears forming in his eyes now. "You were like the daughter I never got to have. I love you." I grab hold of his hand and stay there with him for a while.
"I love you too." I say. I wipe away the sweat on his forehead and feel his breathing become uneven. A sob escapes my mouth but he just smiles up at me. "I'm sorry, Nolan."
A cannon fire a few moments later. The others look up and see me crying over Nolan's body. This moment reminds me of my first Games. How Monty died and I cried over him, just as I'm doing now. I wipe away my tears and stand up as Finnick runs up to me and brings me in for a hug.
I see Katniss look at all of us as we hold sober faces. Now Finnick, Johanna, Beetee, and myself have all lost our district partners. She crosses to Peeta and wraps her arms around him, and for a while we all stay silent.
"Let's get off this stinking island," Johanna says finally. There's only the matter of our weapons now, which we've largely retained. Finnick strips off his undershirt and ties it around the wound Enobaria's knife made in his thigh; it's not too deep. Beetee thinks he can walk now, if we go slowly, so Katniss helps him up. We decided to head to the beach at twelve o'clock. That should provide hours of calm and keep us clear of any poisonous residue. And then Peeta, Johanna, and Finnick head off in three different directions. I head with Finnick.
"Twelve o'clock, right?" says Peeta. "The tail points at twelve."
"Before they spun us," says Finnick. "I was judging by the sun."
"The sun only tells you it's going on four, Finnick," Katniss says.
"I think Katniss's point is, knowing the time doesn't mean you necessarily know 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 the jungle as well," says Beetee.
We circle around the Cornucopia, scutinizing the jungle. It has a baffling uniformity. I remember the tall tree that took the first lightning strike at twelve o'clock, but every sector has a similar tree. Johanna thinks to follow Enobaria's and Brutus's tracks, but they have been blown or washed away. There is no way to tell where anything is. "I should have never mentioned the clock," Katniss says bitterly. "Now they've taken that advantage away as well."
"Only temporarily," says Beetee. "At ten, we'll see the wave again and be back on track."
"Yes, they can't redesign the whole arena," says Peeta.
"It doesn't matter," says Johanna impatentially. "You had to tell us or we never would have moved our camp in the first place, brainless." Ironically, her logical reply seems to be the only thing that comforts Katniss. "Come on, I need water. Anyone have a gut feeling?"