The Hunger Games Trilogy

by Suzanne Collins

“I want the audience to recognize you when you’re in the arena,” says Cinna dreamily. “Katniss, the girl who was on fire.”

Cinna has given me a great advantage. No one will forget me. Not my look, not my name. Katniss. The girl who was on fire.

Peeta rolls his eyes at Haymitch. “She has no idea. The effect she can have.”

And apparently, I have not been as oblivious to him as I imagined, either. The flour. The wrestling. I have kept track of the boy with the bread.

“And remember this. I’m not allowed to bet, but if I could, my money would be on you.” “Truly?” I whisper. “Truly,” says Cinna. He leans down and kisses me on the forehead. “Good luck, girl on fire.”

“You here to finish me off, sweetheart?”

This is the first kiss that we’re both fully aware of. Neither of us hobbled by sickness or pain or simply unconscious. Our lips neither burning with fever or icy cold. This is the first kiss where I actually feel stirring inside my chest. Warm and curious. This is the first kiss that makes me want another.

“I just want to spend every possible minute of the rest of my life with you,” Peeta replies.

Wonderingly, I lift my long, flowing sleeves into the air, and that’s when I see myself on the television screen. Clothed in black except for the white patches on my sleeves. Or should I say my wings. Because Cinna has turned me into a mockingjay.

As I drift off, I try to imagine that world, somewhere in the future, with no Games, no Capitol. A place like the meadow in the song I sang to Rue as she died. Where Peeta’s child could be safe.

It’s an awful lot to take in, this elaborate plan in which I was a piece, just as I was meant to be a piece in the Hunger Games. Used without consent, without knowledge. At least in the Hunger Games, I knew I was being played with.

“We had to save you because you’re the mockingjay, Katniss,” says Plutarch. “While you live, the revolution lives.”

But Gale is not one to keep secrets from me. “Katniss, there is no District Twelve.”

She’s really gone, then. The little girl with the back of her shirt sticking out like a duck tail, the one who needed help reaching the dishes, and who begged to see the frosted cakes in the bakery window. Time and tragedy have forced her to grow too quickly, at least for my taste, into a young woman who stitches bleeding wounds and knows our mother can hear only so much.

In some ways, District 13 is even more controlling than the Capitol.

“President Snow says he’s sending us a message? Well, I have one for him. You can torture us and bomb us and burn our districts to the ground, but do you see that?” One of the cameras follows as I point to the planes burning on the roof of the warehouse across from us. The Capitol seal on a wing glows clearly through the flames. “Fire is catching!” I am shouting now, determined that he will not miss a word. “And if we burn, you burn with us!”

“Haymitch? Not able to face something? Wanted a day off, more likely,” I say. “I think his actual words were ‘I couldn’t face it without a bottle,’ ” says Plutarch.

“Next time we see each other, we’ll be free of him,” says Prim firmly.