Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2)

by Suzanne Collins

“Asked you to wake me without giving me pneumonia,” says Haymitch, passing over his knife.

Well, it’s all on the table now. Maybe that’s better. I don’t do well with ambiguous threats. I’d much rather know the score.

I nod because, by the way he says it, it’s clear that Seneca Crane has been executed. The smell of roses and blood has grown stronger now that only a desk separates us. There’s a rose in President Snow’s lapel, which at least suggests a source of the flower perfume, but it must be genetically enhanced, because no real rose reeks like that. As for the blood . . . I don’t know.

“At what point did he realize the exact degree of your indifference?” he asks, dipping his cookie in his tea. “I’m not indifferent,” I say. “But perhaps not as taken with the young man as you would have the country believe,” he says.

Then suddenly, as I was suggesting I take over the daily snare run, he took my face in his hands and kissed me. I was completely unprepared. You would think that after all the hours I’d spent with Gale — watching him talk and laugh and frown — that I would know all there was to know about his lips. But I hadn’t imagined how warm they would feel pressed against my own. Or how those hands, which could set the most intricate of snares, could as easily entrap me. I think I made some sort of noise in the back of my throat, and I vaguely remember my fingers, curled tightly closed, resting on his chest. Then he let go and said, “I had to do that. At least once.” And he was gone.

The smell of blood . . . it was on his breath.

Over the course of the last five years, the lake’s remarkably unchanged and I’m almost unrecognizable.

In the hallway outside my door, Haymitch gives my shoulder a pat and says, “You could do a lot worse, you know.” He heads off to his compartment, taking the smell of wine with him.

“Look, Katniss, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about the way I acted on the train. I mean, the last train. The one that brought us home. I knew you had something with Gale. I was jealous of him before I even officially met you. And it wasn’t fair to hold you to anything that happened in the Games. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t bother, Haymitch. I know you had to choose one of us. And I’d have wanted it to be her. But this is something different. People are dead out there. More will follow unless we’re very good. We all know I’m better than Katniss in front of the cameras. No one needs to coach me on what to say. But I have to know what I’m walking into,” says Peeta.

I’m so startled I answer. “Yes.” With all that has happened today, has that question actually been preying on him?

When he asks us about the future, Peeta gets down on one knee, pours out his heart, and begs me to marry him. I, of course, accept.

“It’s not necessary. My nightmares are usually about losing you,” he says. “I’m okay once I realize you’re here.”

“It was my aunt’s,” she said. “But I think it’s been in the family a long time.” “It’s a funny choice, a mockingjay,” I said. “I mean, because of what happened in the rebellion. With the jabberjays backfiring on the Capitol and all.”

I don’t try to move away. Why should I, anyway? His voice drops to a whisper. “I love you.” That’s why. I never see these things coming. They happen too fast. One second you’re proposing an escape plan and the next . . . you’re expected to deal with something like this. I come up with what must be the worst possible response. “I know.”

“You were happy enough to go before. I don’t see how an uprising in District Eight does anything but make it more important that we leave. You’re just mad about —” No, I can’t throw Peeta in his face. “What about your family?”

Gale’s wrists are bound to a wooden post. The wild turkey he shot earlier hangs above him, the nail driven through its neck. His jacket’s been cast aside on the ground, his shirt torn away. He slumps unconscious on his knees, held up only by the ropes at his wrists.

We all go, though, following her down the hallway to the insistent ring of the bell. When she opens it, there’s not a squad of Peacekeepers but a single, snow-caked figure. Madge. She holds out a small, damp cardboard box to me. “Use these for your friend,” she says. I take off the lid of the box, revealing half a dozen vials of clear liquid. “They’re my mother’s. She said I could take them. Use them, please.” She runs back into the storm before we can stop her.

The hatred I feel for him, for the phantom girl, for everything, is so real and immediate that it chokes me. Gale is mine. I am his. Anything else is unthinkable. Why did it take him being whipped within an inch of his life to see it?

I wish that Peeta were here to hold me, until I remember I’m not supposed to wish that anymore.

Prim . . . Rue . . . aren’t they the very reason I have to try to fight?

“Who are you?” I ask warily but less belligerently. “My name’s Twill,” says the woman. She’s older. Maybe thirty-five or so. “And this is Bonnie. We’ve run away from District Eight.”

“Ah, there she is. All tuckered out. Finally did the math, did you, sweetheart? Worked out you won’t be going in alone? And now you’re here to ask me . . . what?” he says.

“Peeta’s argument is that since I chose you, I now owe him. Anything he wants. And what he wants is the chance to go in again to protect you,” says Haymitch.

“You could live a hundred lifetimes and not deserve him, you know,” Haymitch says.

Of my mockingjay pin and how it means something completely different now that I know that its former owner was Madge’s aunt, Maysilee Donner, a tribute who was murdered in the arena.

Maysilee Donner turns out to be pretty resourceful herself, for a girl who leaves the Cornucopia with only a small backpack. Inside she finds a bowl, some dried beef, and a blowgun with two dozen darts. Making use of the readily available poisons, she soon turns the blowgun into a deadly weapon by dipping the darts in lethal substances and directing them into her opponents’ flesh.

He’s draped in a golden net that’s strategically knotted at his groin so that he can’t technically be called naked, but he’s about as close as you can get. I’m sure his stylist thinks the more of Finnick the audience sees, the better.

“I outgrew them,” I say. Finnick takes the collar of

“Having an eye for beauty isn’t the same thing as a weakness,” Peeta points out. “Except possibly when it comes to you.”

And I love it. Getting to be myself at last.

We seem particularly riveting to the pair from District 6, who are known morphling addicts.

“Why they’re all acting like this. Finnick with his sugar cubes and Chaff kissing you and that whole thing with Johanna stripping down.” He tries to take on a more serious tone, unsuccessfully. “They’re playing with you because you’re so . . . you know.”

“For me, you’re perfect. They’re just teasing you.”

Great. Now I have to go back and tell Haymitch I want an eighty-year-old and Nuts and Volts for my allies. He’ll love that.

Mags, who I can understand a little better now, decides she’s just going to take a nap.

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

“I wish I could freeze this moment, right here, right now, and live in it forever,” he says.

“Don’t worry. I always channel my emotions into my work. That way I don’t hurt anyone but myself.” . . . and I’m afraid he has hurt himself beyond repair.

“Maybe I’d think that, too, Caesar,” says Peeta bitterly, “if it weren’t for the baby.”

“You just remember who the enemy is,” Haymitch tells me. “That’s all. Now go on. Get out of here.”

“Remember, girl on fire,” he says, “I’m still betting on you.”

Oh, right. I’m supposed to be pregnant, I think. While I’m trying to think what that means and how I should act — maybe throw up or something — Finnick has positioned himself at the edge of the water.

“Katniss wanted her on the first day,” says Peeta.

Then Peeta struggles to his knees and crawls down the slope. We all crawl, since walking now seems as remarkable a feat as flying; we crawl until the vines turn to a narrow strip of sandy beach and the warm water that surrounds the Cornucopia laps our faces. I jerk back as if I’ve touched an open flame.

notice that the spots where the fog droplets touched my skin have scabbed over.

Finnick and I fall back in the sand, laughing our heads off.

“Oh,” I say under my breath. “Tick, tock.” My eyes sweep around the full circle of the arena and I know she’s right. “Tick, tock. This is a clock.”

Peeta draws a new map on a leaf, adding a JJ for jabber-jays in the four-to-five-o’clock section and simply writing beast in the one where we saw the tribute collected in pieces. We now have a good idea of what seven of the hours will bring.

“Because I don’t want you forgetting how different our circumstances are. If you die, and I live, there’s no life for me at all back in District Twelve. You’re my whole life,” he says. “I would never be happy again.” I start to object but he puts a finger to my lips. “It’s different for you. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be hard. But there are other people who’d make your life worth living.”