Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3)

by Suzanne Collins

it takes too much energy to stay angry with someone who cries so much.

It whispers, I can find you. I can reach you. Perhaps I am watching you now.

I press my face against his hand for a moment. “I’ll survive.”

“Katniss . . . he’s still trying to keep you alive.”

That’s my chance. I dart around the distracted guard, push open the door marked 3908, and find them. Half-naked, bruised, and shackled to the wall. My prep team.

We argued last night after he suggested I’d left Coin no choice but to counter my demand for the victors’ safety with one of her own. “Katniss, she’s running this district. She can’t do it if it seems like she’s caving in to your will.” “You mean she can’t stand any dissent, even if it’s fair,” I’d countered. “I mean you put her in a bad position. Making her give Peeta and the others immunity when we don’t even know what sort of damage they might cause,” Gale had

said. “So I should’ve just gone with the program and let the other tributes take their chances? Not that it matters, because that’s what we’re all doing anyway!” That was when I’d slammed the door in his face.

“That saves time. So, let’s all be quiet for a minute. I want everyone to think of one incident where Katniss Everdeen genuinely moved you. Not where you were jealous of her hairstyle, or her dress went up in flames or she made a halfway decent shot with an arrow. Not where Peeta was making you like her. I want to hear one moment where she made you feel something real.”

“We’ll spread the word that she lost the baby from the electrical shock in the arena,” Plutarch replies. “Very sad. Very unfortunate.”

“Fire is catching!” I am shouting now, determined that he will not miss a word. “And if we burn, you burn with us!”

“That is your earpiece. I will give you exactly one more chance to wear it. If you remove it from your ear again, I’ll have you fitted with this.”

I have not sung “The Hanging Tree” out loud for ten years, because it’s forbidden, but I remember every word.

“Because I’m in pain,” he says. “That’s the only way I get your attention.” He picks up the box. “Don’t worry, Katniss. It’ll pass.” He leaves before I can answer.

“That I knew I’d misjudged you. That you do love him. I’m not saying in what way. Maybe you don’t know yourself. But anyone paying attention could see how much you care about him,” he says gently.

I reach out for him and say something like his name and he’s there, holding me and patting my back. “It’s okay. It’ll be okay, sweetheart.”

“No. My mother and younger brother. My girl. They were all dead two weeks after I was crowned victor. Because of that stunt I pulled with the force field,” he answers. “Snow had no one to use against me.”

“The way I always felt wrong kissing him because of you,” I say. Gale holds my gaze. “If I thought that was true, I could almost live with the rest of it.” “It is true,” I admit. “But so is what you said about Peeta.”

So in the fading light I shut my eyes and kiss Gale to make up for all the kisses I’ve withheld, and because it doesn’t matter anymore, and because I’m so desperately lonely I can’t stand it.

“Then it’s like kissing someone who’s drunk. It doesn’t count,” he says with a weak attempt at a laugh.

“No. About six months before that. Right after New Year’s. We were in the Hob, eating some slop of Greasy Sae’s. And Darius was teasing you about trading a rabbit for one of his kisses. And I realized . . . I minded,” he tells me.

On the day my father died, the sirens went off during my school lunch. No one waited for dismissal, or was expected to. The response to a mine accident was something outside the control of even the Capitol.

Because why were we looking for her, when the reverse should have been true?

My father. He seems to be everywhere today. Dying in the mine. Singing his way into Peeta’s muddled consciousness. Flickering in the look Boggs gives me as he protectively wraps the blanket around my shoulders. I miss him so badly it hurts.

“I am,” I say. “That’s why I killed Cato . . . and he killed Thresh . . . and he killed Clove . . . and she tried to kill me. It just goes around and around, and who wins? Not us. Not the districts. Always

the Capitol. But I’m tired of being a piece in their Games.”

“You and me, we made a deal to try and save him. Remember?” Haymitch says. When I don’t respond, he disconnects after a curt “Try and remember.”

Tigris. Deep in my brain, the name rings a bell. She was a fixture — a younger, less disturbing version of herself — in the earliest Hunger Games I can remember.

“Oh, that I do know.” I can just catch Gale’s last words through the layer of fur. “Katniss will pick whoever she thinks she can’t survive without.”

I can survive just fine without either of them.

And that’s when the rest of the parachutes go off.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ve saved him for you.”

But while I think Haymitch might gamble with my life in the arena, I don’t think he’d rat me out to Coin. Whatever problems we may have with each other, we prefer resolving our differences one-on-one.

We stand there, face-to-face, not meeting each other’s eyes. “You didn’t come see me in the hospital.” He doesn’t answer, so finally I just say it. “Was it your bomb?” “I don’t know. Neither does Beetee,” he says. “Does it matter? You’ll always be thinking about it.”

I weigh my options carefully, think everything through. Keeping my eyes on the rose, I say, “I vote yes . . . for Prim.” “Haymitch, it’s up to you,” says Coin. A furious Peeta hammers Haymitch with the atrocity he could become party to, but I can feel Haymitch watching me. This is the moment, then. When we find out exactly just how alike we are, and how much he truly understands me. “I’m with the Mockingjay,” he says.

He’s right. We did. The point of my arrow shifts upward. I release the string. And President Coin collapses over the side of the balcony and plunges to the ground. Dead.

That what I need to survive is not Gale’s fire, kindled with rage and hatred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good

again. And only Peeta can give me that. So after, when he whispers, “You love me. Real or not real?” I tell him, “Real.”