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“Oh, no. It costs a lot more than your life. To murder innocent people?” says Peeta. “It costs everything you are.”
“You could tell me, you know. I’m good at keeping secrets. Even from Mother.” 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.
For a second, I’m afraid he’s dying. I have to remind myself that I don’t care.
“Better not to give in to it. It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.”
Making knots. Making knots. No word. Making knots. Tick-tock. This is a clock. Do not think of Gale. Do not think of Peeta. Making knots. We do not want dinner.
“It’s a saying from thousands of years ago, written in a language called Latin about a place called Rome,” he explains. “Panem et Circenses translates into ‘Bread and Circuses.’ The writer was saying that in return for full bellies and entertainment, his people had given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power.”
ride, I decide she’s less mad than unstable. She laughs at odd places in the conversation or drops out of it distractedly. Those green eyes fixate on a point with such intensity that you find yourself trying to make out what she sees in the empty air. Sometimes, for no reason, she presses both her hands over her ears as if to block out a painful sound.
After the kiss that seals the union, the cheers, and a toast with apple cider, the fiddler strikes up a tune that turns every head from 12. We may have been the smallest, poorest district in Panem, but we know how to dance.
All those months of taking it for granted that Peeta thought I was wonderful are over. Finally, he can see me for who I really am. Violent. Distrustful. Manipulative. Deadly. And I hate him for it.
I find my prep team sitting in a row on the edge of the tub, hunched and defeated. I remember I’m not the only one whose world has been stripped away.
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.
No one. The truth is, it benefits no one to live in a world where these things happen.
A terrible nightmare follows, where I’m lying at the bottom of a deep grave, and every dead person I know by name comes by and throws a shovel full of ashes on me. It’s quite a long dream, considering the list of people, and the deeper I’m buried, the harder it is to breathe. I try to call out, begging them to stop, but the ashes fill my mouth and nose and I can’t make any sound. Still the shovel scrapes on and on and on. . . .
It is the old Katniss’s favorite kind of day.
“She’s dead.” I clutch my middle to dull the pain. Sink down on my heels, rocking the pillow, crying. “She’s dead, you stupid cat. She’s dead.” A new sound, part crying, part singing, comes out of my body, giving voice to my despair. Buttercup begins to wail as well. No matter what I do, he won’t go. He circles me, just out of reach, as wave after wave of sobs racks my body, until eventually I fall unconscious. 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
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We seal the pages with salt water and promises to live well to make their deaths count.
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.”
