Mocking Jay

12
Today I might lose both of them.
I try to imagine a world where both Gale's and Peeta's voices have ceased. Hands stilled. Eyes unblinking.
I'm standing over their bodies, having a last look, leaving the room where they lie. But when I open the door to
step out into the world, there's only a tremendous void. A pale gray nothingness that is all my future holds.
"Do you want me to have them sedate you until it's over?" asks Haymitch. He's not joking. This is a man
who spent his adult life at the bottom of a bottle, trying to anesthetize himself against the Capitol's crimes. The
sixteen-year-old boy who won the second Quarter Quell must have had people he loved--family, friends, a
sweetheart maybe--that he fought to get back to. Where are they now? How is it that until Peeta and I were thrust
upon him, there was no one at all in his life? What did Snow do to them?
"No," I say. "I want to go to the Capitol. I want to be part of the rescue mission."
"They're gone," says Haymitch.
"How long ago did they leave? I could catch up. I could--" What? What could I do?
Haymitch shakes his head. "It'll never happen. You're too valuable and too vulnerable. There was talk of
sending you to another district to divert the Capitol's attention while the rescue takes place. But no one felt you
could handle it."
"Please, Haymitch!" I'm begging now. "I have to do something. I can't just sit here waiting to hear if they
died. There must be something I can do!"
"All right. Let me talk to Plutarch. You stay put." But I can't. Haymitch's footsteps are still echoing in the outer
hall when I fumble my way through the slit in the dividing curtain to find Finnick sprawled out on his stomach, his
hands twisted in his pillowcase. Although it's cowardly--cruel even--to rouse him from the shadowy, muted drug
land to stark reality, I go ahead and do it because I can't stand to face this by myself.
As I explain our situation, his initial agitation mysteriously ebbs. "Don't you see, Katniss, this will decide
things. One way or the other. By the end of the day, they'll either be dead or with us. It's...it's more than we could
hope for!"
Well, that's a sunny view of our situation. And yet there's something calming about the idea that this torment
could come to an end.
The curtain yanks back and there's Haymitch. He has a job for us, if we can pull it together. They still need
post-bombing footage of 13. "If we can get it in the next few hours, Beetee can air it leading up to the rescue,
and maybe keep the Capitol's attention elsewhere."
"Yes, a distraction," says Finnick. "A decoy of sorts."
"What we really need is something so riveting that even President Snow won't be able to tear himself away.
Got anything like that?" asks Haymitch.
Having a job that might help the mission snaps me into focus. While I knock down breakfast and get
prepped, I try to think of what I might say. President Snow must be wondering how that blood-splattered floor and
his roses are affecting me. If he wants me broken, then I will have to be whole. But I don't think I will convince him
of anything by shouting a couple of defiant lines at the camera. Besides, that won't buy the rescue team any time.
Outbursts are short. It's stories that take time.
I don't know if it will work, but when the television crew's all assembled aboveground, I ask Cressida if she
could start out by asking me about Peeta. I take a seat on the fallen marble pillar where I had my breakdown,
wait for the red light and Cressida's question.
"How did you meet Peeta?" she asks.
And then I do the thing that Haymitch has wanted since my first interview. I open up. "When I met Peeta, I
was eleven years old, and I was almost dead." I talk about that awful day when I tried to sell the baby clothes in
the rain, how Peeta's mother chased me from the bakery door, and how he took a beating to bring me the loaves
of bread that saved our lives. "We had never even spoken. The first time I ever talked to Peeta was on the train
to the Games."
"But he was already in love with you," says Cressida.