my position across the square, I can see clearly through the plate-glass front of the long, narrow building. It would be impossible to miss the arrival of a train, or even a single person. But hours pass and no one comes. With each minute, it becomes harder to imagine that anyone survived the assault on the Nut.
It’s well after midnight when Cressida comes to attach a special microphone to my costume. “What’s this for?” I ask.
Haymitch’s voice comes on to explain. “I know you’re not going to like this, but we need you to make a speech.”
“A speech?” I say, immediately feeling queasy.
“I’ll feed it to you, line by line,” he assures me. “You’ll just have to repeat what I say. Look, there’s no sign of life from that mountain. We’ve won, but the fighting’s continuing. So we thought if you went out on the steps of the Justice Building and laid it out—told everybody that the Nut’s defeated, that the Capitol’s presence in District Two is finished—you might be able to get the rest of their forces to surrender.”
I peer at the darkness beyond the square. “I can’t even see their forces.”
“That’s what the mike’s for,” he says. “You’ll be broadcast, both your voice through their emergency audio system, and your image wherever people have access to a screen.”
I know there are a couple of huge screens here on the square. I saw them on the Victory Tour. It might work, if I were good at this sort of thing. Which I’m not. They tried to feed me lines in those early experiments with the propos, too, and it was a flop.
“You could save a lot of lives, Katniss,” Haymitch says finally.
“All right. I’ll give it a try,” I tell him.
It’s strange standing outside at the top of the stairs, fully costumed, brightly lit, but with no visible audience to deliver my speech to. Like I’m doing a show for the moon.
“Let’s make this quick,” says Haymitch. “You’re too exposed.”
My television crew, positioned out in the square with special cameras, indicates that they’re ready. I tell Haymitch to go ahead, then click on my mike and listen carefully to him dictate the first line of the speech. A huge image of me lights up one of the screens over the square as I begin. “People of District Two, this is Katniss Everdeen speaking to you from the steps of your Justice Building, where—”
The pair of trains comes screeching into the train station side by side. As the doors slide open, people tumble out in a cloud of smoke they’ve brought from the Nut. They must have had at least an inkling of what would await them at the square, because you can see them trying to act evasively. Most of them flatten on the floor, and a spray of bullets inside the station takes out the lights. They’ve come armed, as Gale predicted, but they’ve come wounded as well. The moans can be heard in the otherwise silent night air.
Someone kills the lights on the stairs, leaving me in the protection of shadow. A flame blooms inside the station—one of the trains must actually be on fire—and a thick, black smoke billows against the windows. Left with no choice, the people begin to push out into the square, choking but defiantly waving their guns. My eyes dart around the rooftops that ring the square. Every one of them has been fortified with rebel-manned machine gun nests. Moonlight glints off oiled barrels.
A young man staggers out from the station, one hand pressed against a bloody cloth at his cheek, the other dragging a gun. When he trips and falls to his face, I see the scorch marks down the back of his shirt, the red flesh beneath. And suddenly, he’s just another burn victim from a mine accident.
My feet fly down the steps and I take off running for him. “Stop!” I yell at the rebels. “Hold your fire!” The words echo around the square and beyond as the mike amplifies my voice. “Stop!” I’m nearing the young man, reaching down to help him, when he drags himself up to his knees and trains his gun on my head.
I instinctively back up a few steps, raise my bow over my head to show my intention was harmless. Now that he has both hands on his gun, I notice the ragged hole in his cheek where something—falling stone maybe—punctured the flesh. He smells of burning things, hair and meat and fuel.