“Freeze,” Haymitch’s voice whispers in my ear. I follow his order, realizing that this is what all of District 2, all of Panem maybe, must be seeing at the moment. The Mockingjay at the mercy of a man with nothing to lose.
His garbled speech is barely comprehensible. “Give me one reason I shouldn’t shoot you.”
The rest of the world recedes. There’s only me looking into the wretched eyes of the man from the Nut who asks for one reason. Surely I should be able to come up with thousands. But the words that make it to my lips are “I can’t.”
Logically, the next thing that should happen is the man pulling the trigger. But he’s perplexed, trying to make sense of my words. I experience my own confusion as I realize what I’ve said is entirely true, and the noble impulse that carried me across the square is replaced by despair. “I can’t. That’s the problem, isn’t it?” I lower my bow. “We blew up your mine. You burned my district to the ground. We’ve got every reason to kill each other. So do it. Make the Capitol happy. I’m done killing their slaves for them.” I drop my bow on the ground and give it a nudge with my boot. It slides across the stone and comes to rest at his knees.
“I’m not their slave,” the man mutters.
“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.”
Peeta. On the rooftop the night before our first Hunger Games. He understood it all before we’d even set foot in the arena. I hope he’s watching now, that he remembers that night as it happened, and maybe forgives me when I die.
“Keep talking. Tell them about watching the mountain go down,” Haymitch insists.
“When I saw that mountain fall tonight, I thought…they’ve done it again. Got me to kill you—the people in the districts. But why did I do it? District Twelve and District Two have no fight except the one the Capitol gave us.” The young man blinks at me uncomprehendingly. I sink on my knees before him, my voice low and urgent. “And why are you fighting with the rebels on the rooftops? With Lyme, who was your victor? With people who were your neighbors, maybe even your family?”
“I don’t know,” says the man. But he doesn’t take his gun off me.
I rise and turn slowly in a circle, addressing the machine guns. “And you up there? I come from a mining town. Since when do miners condemn other miners to that kind of death, and then stand by to kill whoever manages to crawl from the rubble?”
“Who is the enemy?” whispers Haymitch.
“These people”—I indicate the wounded bodies on the square—“are not your enemy!” I whip back around to the train station. “The rebels are not your enemy! We all have one enemy, and it’s the Capitol! This is our chance to put an end to their power, but we need every district person to do it!”
The cameras are tight on me as I reach out my hands to the man, to the wounded, to the reluctant rebels across Panem. “Please! Join us!”
My words hang in the air. I look to the screen, hoping to see them recording some wave of reconciliation going through the crowd.
Instead I watch myself get shot on television.
16
“Always.”
In the twilight of morphling, Peeta whispers the word and I go searching for him. It’s a gauzy, violet-tinted world, with no hard edges, and many places to hide. I push through cloud banks, follow faint tracks, catch the scent of cinnamon, of dill. Once I feel his hand on my cheek and try to trap it, but it dissolves like mist through my fingers.
When I finally begin to surface into the sterile hospital room in 13, I remember. I was under the influence of sleep syrup. My heel had been injured after I’d climbed out on a branch over the electric fence and dropped back into 12. Peeta had put me to bed and I had asked him to stay with me as I was drifting off. He had whispered something I couldn’t quite catch. But some part of my brain had trapped his single word of reply and let it swim up through