The Hunger Games Trilogy Read online

  “I’m sorry, Johanna,” says Finnick. It takes a moment to place Blight. I think he was Johanna’s male counterpart from District 7, but I hardly remember seeing him. Come to think of it, I don’t even think he showed up for training.

  “Yeah, well, he wasn’t much, but he was from home,” she says. “And he left me alone with these two.” She nudges Beetee, who’s barely conscious, with her shoe. “He got a knife in the back at the Cornucopia. And her—”

  We all look over at Wiress, who’s circling around, coated in dried blood, and murmuring, “Tick, tock. Tick, tock.”

  “Yeah, we know. Tick, tock. Nuts is in shock,” says Johanna. This seems to draw Wiress in her direction and she careens into Johanna, who harshly shoves her to the beach. “Just stay down, will you?”

  “Lay off her,” I snap.

  Johanna narrows her brown eyes at me in hatred. “Lay off her?” she hisses. She steps forward before I can react and slaps me so hard I see stars. “Who do you think got them out of that bleeding jungle for you? You—” Finnick tosses her writhing body over his shoulder and carries her out into the water and repeatedly dunks her while she screams a lot of really insulting things at me. But I don’t shoot. Because she’s with Finnick and because of what she said, about getting them for me.

  “What did she mean? She got them for me?” I ask Peeta.

  “I don’t know. You did want them originally,” he reminds me.

  “Yeah, I did. Originally.” But that answers nothing. I look down at Beetee’s inert body. “But I won’t have them long unless we do something.”

  Peeta lifts Beetee up in his arms and I take Wiress by the hand and we go back to our little beach camp. I sit Wiress in the shallows so she can get washed up a bit, but she just clutches her hands together and occasionally mumbles, “Tick, tock.” I unhook Beetee’s belt and find a heavy metal cylinder attached to the side with a rope of vines. I can’t tell what it is, but if he thought it was worth saving, I’m not going to be the one who loses it. I toss it up on the sand. Beetee’s clothes are glued to him with blood, so Peeta holds him in the water while I loosen them. It takes some time to get the jumpsuit off, and then we find his undergarments are saturated with blood as well. There’s no choice but to strip him naked to get him clean, but I have to say this doesn’t make much of an impression on me anymore. Our kitchen table’s been full of so many naked men this year. You kind of get used to it after a while.

  We put down Finnick’s mat and lay Beetee on his stomach so we can examine his back. There’s a gash about six inches long running from his shoulder blade to below his ribs. Fortunately it’s not too deep. He’s lost a lot of blood, though—you can tell by the pallor of his skin—and it’s still oozing out of the wound.

  I sit back on my heels, trying to think. What do I have to work with? Seawater? I feel like my mother when her first line of defense for treating everything was snow. I look over at the jungle. I bet there’s a whole pharmacy in there if I knew how to use it. But these aren’t my plants. Then I think about the moss Mags gave me to blow my nose. “Be right back,” I tell Peeta. Fortunately the stuff seems to be pretty common in the jungle. I rip an armful from the nearby trees and carry it back to the beach. I make a thick pad out of the moss, place it on Beetee’s cut, and secure it by tying vines around his body. We get some water into him and then pull him into the shade at the edge of the jungle.

  “I think that’s all we can do,” I say.

  “It’s good. You’re good with this healing stuff,” he says. “It’s in your blood.”

  “No,” I say, shaking my head. “I got my father’s blood.” The kind that quickens during a hunt, not an epidemic. “I’m going to see about Wiress.”

  I take a handful of the moss to use as a rag and join Wiress in the shallows. She doesn’t resist as I work off her clothing, scrub the blood from her skin. But her eyes are dilated with fear, and when I speak, she doesn’t respond except to say with ever-increasing urgency, “Tick, tock.” She does seem to be trying to tell me something, but with no Beetee to explain her thoughts, I’m at a loss.

  “Yes, tick, tock. Tick, tock,” I say. This seems to calm her down a little. I wash out her jumpsuit until there’s hardly a trace of blood, and help her back into it. It’s not damaged like ours were. Her belt’s fine, so I fasten that on, too. Then I pin her undergarments, along with Beetee’s, under some rocks and let them soak.

  By the time I’ve rinsed out Beetee’s jumpsuit, a shiny clean Johanna and peeling Finnick have joined us. For a while, Johanna gulps water and stuffs herself with shellfish while I try to coax something into Wiress. Finnick tells about the fog and the monkeys in a detached, almost clinical voice, avoiding the most important detail of the story.

  Everybody offers to guard while the others rest, but in the end, it’s Johanna and I who stay up. Me because I’m really rested, she because she simply refuses to lie down. The two of us sit in silence on the beach until the others have gone to sleep.

  Johanna glances over at Finnick, to be sure, then turns to me. “How’d you lose Mags?”

  “In the fog. Finnick had Peeta. I had Mags for a while. Then I couldn’t lift her. Finnick said he couldn’t take them both. She kissed him and walked right into the poison,” I say.

  “She was Finnick’s mentor, you know,” Johanna says accusingly.

  “No, I didn’t,” I say.

  “She was half his family,” she says a few moments later, but there’s less venom behind it.

  We watch the water lap up over the undergarments. “So what were you doing with Nuts and Volts?” I ask.

  “I told you—I got them for you. Haymitch said if we were to be allies I had to bring them to you,” says Johanna. “That’s what you told him, right?”

  No, I think. But I nod my head in assent. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “I hope so.” She gives me a look filled with loathing, like I’m the biggest drag possible on her life. I wonder if this is what it’s like to have an older sister who really hates you.

  “Tick, tock,” I hear behind me. I turn and see Wiress has crawled over. Her eyes are focused on the jungle.

  “Oh, goody, she’s back. Okay, I’m going to sleep. You and Nuts can guard together,” Johanna says. She goes over and flings herself down beside Finnick.

  “Tick, tock,” whispers Wiress. I guide her in front of me and get her to lie down, stroking her arm to soothe her. She drifts off, stirring restlessly, occasionally sighing out her phrase. “Tick, tock.”

  “Tick, tock,” I agree softly. “It’s time for bed. Tick, tock. Go to sleep.”

  The sun rises in the sky until it’s directly over us. It must be noon, I think absently. Not that it matters. Across the water, off to the right, I see the enormous flash as the lightning bolt hits the tree and the electrical storm begins again. Right in the same area it did last night. Someone must have moved into its range, triggered the attack. I sit for a while watching the lightning, keeping Wiress calm, lulled into a sort of peacefulness by the lapping of the water. I think of last night, how the lightning began just after the bell tolled. Twelve bongs.

  “Tick, tock,” Wiress says, surfacing to consciousness for a moment and then going back under.

  Twelve bongs last night. Like it was midnight. Then lightning. The sun overhead now. Like it’s noon. And lightning.

  Slowly I rise up and survey the arena. The lightning there. In the next pie wedge over came the blood rain, where Johanna, Wiress, and Beetee were caught. We would have been in the third section, right next to that, when the fog appeared. And as soon as it was sucked away, the monkeys began to gather in the fourth. Tick, tock. My head snaps to the other side. A couple of hours ago, at around ten, that wave came out of the second section to the left of where the lightning strikes now. At noon. At midnight. At noon.

  “Tick, tock,” Wiress says in her sleep. As the lightning ceases and the blood rain begins just to the right of it, her words suddenly make sense.

&nbs
p; “Oh,” I say under my breath. “Tick, tock.” My eyes sweep around the full circle of the arena and I know she’s right. “Tick, tock. This is a clock.”

  23

  A clock. I can almost see the hands ticking around the twelve-sectioned face of the arena. Each hour begins a new horror, a new Gamemaker weapon, and ends the previous. Lightning, blood rain, fog, monkeys—those are the first four hours on the clock. And at ten, the wave. I don’t know what happens in the other seven, but I know Wiress is right.

  At present, the blood rain’s falling and we’re on the beach below the monkey segment, far too close to the fog for my liking. Do the various attacks stay within the confines of the jungle? Not necessarily. The wave didn’t. If that fog leaches out of the jungle, or the monkeys return…

  “Get up,” I order, shaking Peeta and Finnick and Johanna awake. “Get up—we have to move.” There’s enough time, though, to explain the clock theory to them. About Wiress’s tick-tocking and how the movements of the invisible hands trigger a deadly force in each section.

  I think I’ve convinced everyone who’s conscious except Johanna, who’s naturally opposed to liking anything I suggest. But even she agrees it’s better to be safe than sorry.

  While the others collect our few possessions and get Beetee back into his jumpsuit, I rouse Wiress. She awakes with a panicked “tick, tock!”

  “Yes, tick, tock, the arena’s a clock. It’s a clock, Wiress, you were right,” I say. “You were right.”

  Relief floods her face—I guess because somebody has finally understood what she’s known probably from the first tolling of the bells. “Midnight.”

  “It starts at midnight,” I confirm.

  A memory struggles to surface in my brain. I see a clock. No, it’s a watch, resting in Plutarch Heavensbee’s palm. “It starts at midnight,” Plutarch said. And then my mockingjay lit up briefly and vanished. In retrospect, it’s like he was giving me a clue about the arena. But why would he? At the time, I was no more a tribute in these Games than he was. Maybe he thought it would help me as a mentor. Or maybe this had been the plan all along.

  Wiress nods at the blood rain. “One-thirty,” she says.

  “Exactly. One-thirty. And at two, a terrible poisonous fog begins there,” I say, pointing at the nearby jungle. “So we have to move somewhere safe now.” She smiles and stands up obediently. “Are you thirsty?” I hand her the woven bowl and she gulps down about a quart. Finnick gives her the last bit of bread and she gnaws on it. With the inability to communicate overcome, she’s functioning again.

  I check my weapons. Tie up the spile and the tube of medicine in the parachute and fix it to my belt with vine.

  Beetee’s still pretty out of it, but when Peeta tries to lift him, he objects. “Wire,” he says.

  “She’s right here,” Peeta tells him. “Wiress is fine. She’s coming, too.”

  But still Beetee struggles. “Wire,” he insists.

  “Oh, I know what he wants,” says Johanna impatiently. She crosses the beach and picks up the cylinder we took from his belt when we were bathing him. It’s coated in a thick layer of congealed blood. “This worthless thing. It’s some kind of wire or something. That’s how he got cut. Running up to the Cornucopia to get this. I don’t know what kind of weapon it’s supposed to be. I guess you could pull off a piece and use it as a garrote or something. But really, can you imagine Beetee garroting somebody?”

  “He won his Games with wire. Setting up that electrical trap,” says Peeta. “It’s the best weapon he could have.”

  There’s something odd about Johanna not putting this together. Something that doesn’t quite ring true. Suspicious. “Seems like you’d have figured that out,” I say. “Since you nicknamed him Volts and all.”

  Johanna’s eyes narrow at me dangerously. “Yeah, that was really stupid of me, wasn’t it?” she says. “I guess I must have been distracted by keeping your little friends alive. While you were…what, again? Getting Mags killed off?”

  My fingers tighten on the knife handle at my belt.

  “Go ahead. Try it. I don’t care if you are knocked up, I’ll rip your throat out,” says Johanna.

  I know I can’t kill her right now. But it’s just a matter of time with Johanna and me. Before one of us offs the other.

  “Maybe we all had better be careful where we step,” says Finnick, shooting me a look. He takes the coil and sets it on Beetee’s chest. “There’s your wire, Volts. Watch where you plug it.”

  Peeta picks up the now-unresisting Beetee. “Where to?”

  “I’d like to go to the Cornucopia and watch. Just to make sure we’re right about the clock,” says Finnick. It seems as good a plan as any. Besides, I wouldn’t mind the chance of going over the weapons again. And there are six of us now. Even if you count Beetee and Wiress out, we’ve got four good fighters. It’s so different from where I was last year at this point, doing everything on my own. Yes, it’s great to have allies as long as you can ignore the thought that you’ll have to kill them.

  Beetee and Wiress will probably find some way to die on their own. If we have to run from something, how far would they get? Johanna, frankly, I could easily kill if it came down to protecting Peeta. Or maybe even just to shut her up. What I really need is for someone to take out Finnick for me, since I don’t think I can do it personally. Not after all he’s done for Peeta. I think about maneuvering him into some kind of encounter with the Careers. It’s cold, I know. But what are my options? Now that we know about the clock, he probably won’t die in the jungle, so someone’s going to have to kill him in battle.

  Because this is so repellent to think about, my mind frantically tries to change topics. But the only thing that distracts me from my current situation is fantasizing about killing President Snow. Not very pretty daydreams for a seventeen-year-old girl, I guess, but very satisfying.

  We walk down the nearest sand strip, approaching the Cornucopia with care, just in case the Careers are concealed there. I doubt they are, because we’ve been on the beach for hours and there’s been no sign of life. The area’s abandoned, as I expected. Only the big golden horn and the picked-over pile of weapons remain.

  When Peeta lays Beetee in the bit of shade the Cornucopia provides, he calls out to Wiress. She crouches beside him and he puts the coil of wire in her hands. “Clean it, will you?” he asks.

  Wiress nods and scampers over to the water’s edge, where she dunks the coil in the water. She starts quietly singing some funny little song, about a mouse running up a clock. It must be for children, but it seems to make her happy.

  “Oh, not the song again,” says Johanna, rolling her eyes. “That went on for hours before she started tick-tocking.”

  Suddenly Wiress stands up very straight and points to the jungle. “Two,” she says.

  I follow her finger to where the wall of fog has just begun to seep out onto the beach. “Yes, look, Wiress is right. It’s two o’clock and the fog has started.”

  “Like clockwork,” says Peeta. “You were very smart to figure that out, Wiress.”

  Wiress smiles and goes back to singing and dunking her coil. “Oh, she’s more than smart,” says Beetee. “She’s intuitive.” We all turn to look at Beetee, who seems to be coming back to life. “She can sense things before anyone else. Like a canary in one of your coal mines.”

  “What’s that?” Finnick asks me.

  “It’s a bird that we take down into the mines to warn us if there’s bad air,” I say.

  “What’s it do, die?” asks Johanna.

  “It stops singing first. That’s when you should get out. But if the air’s too bad, it dies, yes. And so do you.” I don’t want to talk about dying songbirds. They bring up thoughts of my father’s death and Rue’s death and Maysilee Donner’s death and my mother inheriting her songbird. Oh, great, and now I’m thinking of Gale, deep down in that horrible mine, with President Snow’s threat hanging over his head. So easy to make it look like an accident dow
n there. A silent canary, a spark, and nothing more.

  I go back to imagining killing the president.

  Despite her annoyance at Wiress, Johanna’s as happy as I’ve seen her in the arena. While I’m adding to my stock of arrows, she pokes around until she comes up with a pair of lethal-looking axes. It seems an odd choice until I see her throw one with such force it sticks in the sunsoftened gold of the Cornucopia. Of course. Johanna Mason. District 7. Lumber. I bet she’s been tossing around axes since she could toddle. It’s like Finnick with his trident. Or Beetee with his wire. Rue with her knowledge of plants. I realize it’s just another disadvantage the District 12 tributes have faced over the years. We don’t go down in the mines until we’re eighteen. It looks like most of the other tributes learn something about their trades early on. There are things you do in a mine that could come in handy in the Games. Wielding a pick. Blowing things up. Give you an edge. The way my hunting did. But we learn them too late.

  While I’ve been messing with the weapons, Peeta’s been squatting on the ground, drawing something with the tip of his knife on a large, smooth leaf he brought from the jungle. I look over his shoulder and see he’s creating a map of the arena. In the center is the Cornucopia on its circle of sand with the twelve strips branching out from it. It looks like a pie sliced into twelve equal wedges. There’s another circle representing the waterline and a slightly larger one indicating the edge of the jungle. “Look how the Cornucopia’s positioned,” he says to me.

  I examine the Cornucopia and see what he means. “The tail points toward twelve o’clock,” I say.

  “Right, so this is the top of our clock,” he says, and quickly scratches the numbers one through twelve around the clock face. “Twelve to one is the lightning zone.” He writes lightning in tiny print in the corresponding wedge, then works clockwise adding blood, fog, and monkeys in the following sections.