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However, the true atrocities, the most frightening, incorporate a perverse psychological twist designed to terrify the victim. The sight of the wolf mutts with the dead tributes’ eyes. The sound of the jabberjays replicating Prim’s tortured screams. The smell of Snow’s roses mixed with the victims’ blood. Carried across the sewer.
I’m running on hate. When the energy for that ebbs, I’ll be worthless.
“That’s because Plutarch doesn’t care who dies,” I say. “Not as long as his Games are a success.”
“None of the people we lost were idiots. They knew what they were doing. They followed you because they believed you really could kill Snow.”
“Katniss will pick whoever she thinks she can’t survive without.”
Gale knows better. Katniss will pick whoever needs her the most, whoever will suffer the most without her. (Or would have, all things being equal, which they weren’t.)
Everything that moves is a target. People shoot reflexively, and I’m no exception.
There’s nothing to do but move forward, killing whoever comes into our path.
Everyone inside the barricade is a child. Toddlers to teenagers.
This is for Snow’s protection. The children form his human shield.
I think she hears me. Because for just a moment, she catches sight of me, her lips form my name.
My mother buries her grief in her work. Having no work, grief buries me.
“On my authority,” says Paylor. “She has a right to anything behind that door.”
I’ve never been able to decide if she did this for political gain or because she thought it was right (or both).
“I’m sure he wasn’t gunning for your sister, but these things happen.”
I mean, someone let her go.
Make no mistake, she was intending to take my place right from the beginning.
Yeeep
Suddenly, I’m thinking of Prim, who was not yet fourteen, not yet old enough to be granted the title of soldier, but somehow working on the front lines.
And then a terrible thought hits me: What if they’re not going to kill me? What if they have more plans for me? A new way to remake, train, and use me?
They can design dream weapons that come to life in my hands, but they will never again brainwash me into the necessity of using them.
I no longer feel any allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despite being one myself.
Because something is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children’s lives to settle its differences. You can spin it any way you like. Snow thought the Hunger Games were an efficient means of control. Coin thought the parachutes would expedite the war. But in the end, who does it benefit? No one. The truth is, it benefits no one to live in a world where these things happen.
An emergency election was thrown together and Paylor was voted in as president.
At least there was a vote, though I’m guessing just of the already powerful.
Although who knows? Maybe this will be it, Katniss.” “What?” I ask. “The time it sticks.
I really can’t believe he didn’t respond with “the war to end all wars.”
But he must understand. He must know that the unthinkable has happened and to survive will require previously unthinkable acts. Because hours later, when I come to in my bed, he’s there in the moonlight. Crouched beside me, yellow eyes alert, guarding me from the night.
Buttercup fan forever.
