Catching Fire

they’ll use Annie for bait, Finnick?”
    I can hear him weeping but I don’t care. They probably won’t even bother to question her, she’s so far gone. Gone right off the deep end years ago in her Games. There’s a good chance I’m headed in the same direction. Maybe I’m already going crazy and no one has the heart to tell me. I feel crazy enough.
    “I wish she was dead,” he says. “I wish they were all dead and we were, too. It would be best.”
    Well, there’s no good response to that. I can hardly dispute it since I was walking around with a syringe to kill Peeta when I found them. Do I really want him dead? What I want . . . what I want is to have him back. But I’ll never get him back now. Even if the rebel forces could somehow overthrow the Capitol, you can be sure President Snow’s last act would be to cut Peeta’s throat. No. I will never get him back. So then dead is best.
    But will Peeta know that or will he keep fighting? He’s so strong and such a good liar. Does he think he has a chance of surviving? Does he even care if he does? He wasn’t planning on it, anyway. He had already signed off on life. Maybe, if he knows I was rescued, he’s even happy. Feels he fulfilled his mission to keep me alive.
    I think I hate him even more than I do Haymitch.
    I give up. Stop speaking, responding, refuse food and water. They can pump whatever they want into my arm, but it takes more than that to keep a person going once she’s lost the will to live. I even have a funny notion that if I do die, maybe Peeta will be allowed to live. Not as a free person but as an Avox or something, waiting on the future tributes of District 12. Then maybe he could find some way to escape. My death could, in fact, still save him.
    If it can’t, no matter. It’s enough to die of spite. To punish Haymitch, who, of all the people in this rotting world, has turned Peeta and me into pieces in his Games. I trusted him. I put what was precious in Haymitch’s hands. And he has betrayed me.
    “See, this is why no one lets you make the plans,” he said.
    That’s true. No one in their right mind would let me make the plans. Because I obviously can’t tell a friend from an enemy.
    A lot of people come by to talk to me, but I make all their words sound like the clicking of the insects in the jungle. Meaningless and distant. Dangerous, but only if approached. Whenever the words start to become distinct, I moan until they give me more painkiller and that fixes things right up.
    Until one time, I open my eyes and find someone I cannot block out looking down at me. Someone who will not plead, or explain, or think he can alter my design with entreaties, because he alone really knows how I operate.
    “Gale,” I whisper.
    “Hey, Catnip.” He reaches down and pushes a strand of hair out of my eyes. One side of his face has been burned fairly recently. His arm is in a sling, and I can see bandages under his miner’s shirt. What has happened to him? How is he even here? Something very bad has happened back home.
    It is not so much a question of forgetting Peeta as remembering the others. All it takes is one look at Gale and they come surging into the present, demanding to be acknowledged.
    “Prim?” I gasp.
    “She’s alive. So is your mother. I got them out in time,” he says.
    “They’re not in District Twelve?” I ask.
    “After the Games, they sent in planes. Dropped firebombs.” He hesitates. “Well, you know what happened to the Hob.”
    I do know. I saw it go up. That old warehouse embedded with coal dust. The whole district’s covered with the stuff. A new kind of horror begins to rise up inside me as I imagine firebombs hitting the Seam.
    “They’re not in District Twelve?” I repeat. As if saying it will somehow fend off the truth.
    “Katniss,” Gale says softly.
    I recognize that voice. It’s the same one he uses to approach wounded animals before he delivers a deathblow. I instinctively raise my hand to block his words but he catches it and holds on tightly.
    “Don’t,” I whisper.
    But Gale is not one to keep secrets from me. “Katniss, there is no District Twelve.”
    END OF BOOK TWO

About the Author
    Suzanne Collins is the author of the bestselling Underland Chronicles series, which started with



Copyright © 2009 by Suzanne Collins
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