Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Prologue

Annie’s left ankle throbs, heading up a long list of remnants of the force Shale used to pull her back down the stairs from the roof. Her ribs, elbows, and knees ache from repeated impact with the risers. She’s sure she broke the knuckles of her right hand when she punched him in the mouth, just before the Peacekeepers cuffed her wrists. She might have broken one of his teeth; she hopes she did. And yet every bit of physical discomfort and outright pain pales when she thinks of Martin Perch.

Lowering herself carefully to the floor beside his body, she reaches out to smooth the tawny hair back from his forehead. His eyes still stare at the ceiling, but they’re not his eyes anymore. He’s gone. She gently closes the lids and, with surprisingly steady hands, shifts his head to her lap so he looks as though he might be sleeping, if it weren’t for all the blood.

“Martin, I’m so sorry,” she whispers. Guilt washes over her, even though she knows he made his own choices and those choices weren’t about her. It was pure, dumb luck that (an ally from District 1, a boy with whom they’d both trained, laughed, plotted, and planned) a Peacekeeper’s bullets struck him down, that (Erik) Martin hadn’t moved fast enough after (she killed the boy from 2 in self-defense) he shouted for Annie to run for the door. It still feels as though (Erik) Martin died for her. Annie shakes her head, squeezing her eyes shut in an attempt to push the images from her Games away. At least this time, after losing her district partner, she’s still functional.

“He was a traitor.” Shale sits on the couch staring at her; metal cuffs circle his wrists, too. “He deserved to die,” he continues, armored in self-righteousness.

Annie glances past him to their matched pair of Peacekeeper guards standing at each side of the only door into the victors’ lounge, rifles in hand. The darkened glass of the visors covering their faces makes them look like some kind of insect. Laughter, razor sharp, wells up inside her. She tamps down on it, but it’s still there, waiting to slice from her if she lets her guard down.

“He was a good man,” she tells the victor from District 2. “And none of us deserved what we got.” Not the nightmares from the Games, and not the nightmare they’re living now. She wonders if she’ll ever get the chance to tell Elena Perch just how her husband died or if all Elena will have are Capitol lies.

But then, that’s all any of us has, isn’t it? Capitol lies? Lies that say it’s a good thing to come home a victor from the Hunger Games. That victors are heroes to their districts. Fame and fortune and adoration will follow them. They bring honor to their districts. They will emerge triumphant once they vanquish all of their enemies, and they won’t ever face such a trial again. None of it is anything but Capitol lies.

When had things inside her head shifted so much toward rebellion? Annie’s feelings now aren’t all because of Finnick. She suspects Haymitch and Mags and Martin himself, rebels all, contributed to this new attitude. But Mags and Martin are both dead now, and she doesn’t know where Haymitch is, only that he was ready to board a hovercraft on the roof of this very building when Shale ripped her away from him. Haymitch was going to take her to Finnick, he said, or at least he hoped.

Finnick.

“Oh, my love,” she murmurs, too low for either Shale or the Peacekeepers to hear, “where are you? Will I ever see you again?” Her last sight of him was in the jungle, beneath what they called the lightning tree, holding Beetee steady on his shoulders as the older man reached for a higher branch.

Annie jerks, her heart racing as the door opens for a Peacekeeper officer, helmetless and rank plain on his sleeve, to step into the victors’ lounge. The guards snap to attention. The man surveys the room, taking in the blood-spattered, bullet-pitted walls. His gaze briefly touches each lifeless body, both Peacekeeper and victor, lingering a bit longer on the living, first Shale and then Annie.

Over his shoulder, he says, “It’s safe to enter, Mr. President,” and then steps aside, his eyes fixed on Shale. Apparently he thinks Shale presents the greater threat to the safety and well-being of the President of Panem. Annie takes a deep breath to hold back more hysterical laughter. Her eyes begin to water with the effort so she closes them, but that only allows her to better see the awful images of the Peacekeepers on the stairs falling, dying, blossoms of blood blooming on their white armor as bullets from her gun tear into them. When the sweet scent of roses wafts its way toward her, Annie’s eyes snap open.

Coriolanus Snow pauses in the doorway, his eyes traveling nearly the same path as the Peacekeeper officer’s a moment before. When his gaze reaches Annie, he strolls over to her, careful not to step in any of the blood pooled on the carpet, but otherwise seeming relaxed. His face is expressionless except for his eyes. The rage she sees there sets her heart to pounding harder. She can barely breathe past the weight of his attention, past the stench of roses and blood and her own fear.

Snow holds out a hand; Annie stares at it, frozen. Martin’s head in her lap feels like an anchor dragging her down.

“I’m disappointed in you, Miss Cresta. You showed far more courage in my office a few days ago.”

“I’m not courageous.” If I were, I’d do to you what I did to the Peacekeeper who killed Martin. She can almost feel the knife sink into his throat, the hot blood flow over her hand and wrist, but she remains motionless, fighting nausea.

“Oh, but I think you’re a very brave young woman.” Snow pauses, considering her. “Though perhaps not wise.” He gestures toward the bodies on the stairs and bullet holes in the walls. “I’m told much of this was your handiwork, Annie.”

She shudders when he says her name. “I was terrified.”

Snow laughs. “I like you, Annie. It’s easy to see what Finnick saw in you.” His voice takes on a deceptively somber tone. “Such a tragedy that he didn’t survive the fall of the arena. I’m told electrocution is quite,” he glances at Martin’s blood-stained body before returning his attention to Annie, “painful.” He raises one eyebrow, meeting her gaze as he draws out the word.

Annie’s heart stops. Her lungs stop. Her world stops. The only thing that remains is the unvoiced scream trapped in her throat as the walls of the caldera shatter and the water they held back drags her into oblivion.

xXx

The first time Finnick woke, he lay on little more than a table with padding. Wires and tubes attached him to a monitor beside his cot. Katniss lay unconscious to his left on a cot just like his, her body covered to her shoulders by a sheet; Beetee was across the aisle. Both sported as many wires and tubes as Finnick himself. Of Johanna, Peeta, or Enobaria there was no sign, and Plutarch later confirmed Johanna and the others were Capitol prisoners.

And Annie? When Plutarch hadn’t responded, hadn’t even seemed to understand when Finnick asked about Annie was when Haymitch told him, without ever saying a word, that Snow had her. What was left of Finnick’s world came crashing down, taking him with it.

Reluctantly, he wakes again, but he doesn’t open his eyes. If he denies he’s awake at all, that this is anything other than another nightmare, then maybe it will go away. Everything is pretty surreal, after all. It feels like someone else’s life, not like it’s really happening to him. But he’s never had that kind of luck.

“She’s not going to take it well,” Haymitch is saying from Finnick’s left. The start of the observation is indistinct, unsteady. His voice isn’t muffled, exactly – more like he’s facing away or, given the slightly bouncy sound of it, like he’s walking toward where Finnick and the others lay.

“The boy’s alive,” Plutarch replies as if to say, what more could she want? His voice is clearer, closer, not moving at all. Realizing how close he is, Finnick suddenly doesn’t want to retreat back into that welcoming darkness. Finnick Odair has collected secrets for too long; it’s too ingrained. Even from friends and allies, tidbits of information, no matter how mundane, can be useful things. Finnick keeps his eyes closed, his muscles lax. “That’s more than I can say for Thaniel.”

A shoe scrapes on metal as Haymitch comes to a stop. “Or Acer and Pierce, Watt, Rae.” Haymitch pauses for a moment, and all Finnick hears is the sound of the monitors. “And Martin. He and Finnick were friends.”

Martin Perch? Dead? And Rae, too? Add that to Annie, held prisoner along with Johanna… The beeping of one of the monitors changes, grows faster, more erratic, until the rest of what the two men say fades into the background once more as Finnick tunes them out, holding himself alone in his grief. Snow has Annie, but where? And will he use her as a weapon against him? Or worse, will he simply use her?

The third, or possibly the fourth, time he wakes he’s alone, except for Katniss and Beetee. They all three still have wires and tubes sticking out of their bodies. Katniss mutters Peeta’s name in her sleep, the sound muffled by a plastic mask over her face. Oxygen, maybe? She pulls against straps holding her wrists and ankles to the cot. Beetee lies motionless. The only indication he’s still alive comes from the monitor displaying his heart rate and respiration. It’s too far away for Finnick to read, but he sees numbers change from time to time. Lifting his head enough to do even that much sets it to spinning, though, and he fades back out before his head hits the padding.

When Finnick wakes once more, simple bandages replace the tubes and wires, although the uncomfortable cots and his companions remain the same. His eyelids feel glued to eyes almost as dry as his mouth. He cautiously sits, folding his legs beneath the sheet. After rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands in a mostly futile attempt to clear his vision, he looks around.

Katniss appears to be asleep, no longer strapped to the bed. There’s a bandage around her right arm where her tracker used to be, evidence Johanna succeeded in that part of the plan. Beetee looks somehow shrunken beneath his white sheet, like a child rather than an adult. A bag of clear liquid hangs from a hook over his cot, and a tube leads from the bag to his right arm. There’s a bandage there that could as easily be covering the wound left when Finnick cut out Beetee’s tracker as holding the tube in place.

Gingerly, Finnick swings his legs over the side of his cot and sets his feet on the smooth metal floor. He shivers at the absence of warmth when the sheet falls away, leaving him wearing only a thin tunic and his legs bare. There’s a slight vibration rising up through his soles; he’s been on enough hovercrafts in his life to know the feel of the engines. He takes a tentative step, fairly certain if he falls, the medics will find him unconscious in a heap on the floor when they come to check on him. If they come to check on him. Other than Beetee’s monitors, it feels as though everyone has abandoned them.

Once he’s steady on his legs, Finnick quickly searches for something resembling clothes. He dons a set of gray shirt and pants that probably belong to one of the medics before leaving the room in search of Haymitch, the only person he feels he can trust. The shirt keeps sliding off one shoulder or the other, and the pants are too loose. Eventually he stops adjusting the shirt in favor of holding the pants up so they won’t slip down past his hips again.

He finds Haymitch and Plutarch Heavensbee eating eggs, fruit, and toast in a room at the end of a narrow corridor. Outside curved windows, he sees blue sky and the tops of trees in the distance, but he has no idea where they might be. At least that sky isn’t pink.

“Finnick.” Haymitch stands. “You’re looking dapper as always.”

“I would have said like death warmed over.” Plutarch spears a bite of what looks like pineapple as Haymitch shoves a chair toward Finnick.

Feeling weak as a kitten, he grabs the back of the chair, clinging to it for a moment before dropping heavily into it, his head still spinning. He’d laugh at the greetings they’d given him, so in keeping with their personalities, but he doesn’t think he can do it without choking on it.

“In a couple of weeks, this’ll be all the rage in the Capitol.” His voice wavers back and forth between gravelly and a strained whisper; either way, it’s not quite his own.

He needs to know just how bad things are, where Snow is holding Annie, where Johanna and Peeta and Enobaria landed, whether they died when Katniss shorted out the arena force field or whether they’re in Snow’s hands, too. He doesn’t know if his family did as he’d asked them, heading out to sea or if Snow has his Peacekeepers hunting them down. There are so many things he needs to know. Too many things. Instead, at least for now, he croaks out, “Maybe some water?”

Chapter Text

Chapter 1 - Ash and Dust

Finnick is dead.

Fingers dig painfully into Annie’s biceps. She tries to shake off the Peacekeepers, one on each arm, but they only tighten their grip, digging into muscle almost to the bone beneath. Before they drag her more than a step or two, she gets her feet under herself once more.

Finnick is dead.

Everything around her is a blur of light and darkness, all the colors leached away.

Finnick is dead.

It’s hard to put one foot in front of the other without tangling herself up. Her knees hurt with a pain that’s sharp and immediate. She must have fallen again, but she doesn’t remember falling after Shale dragged her from the roof.

Finnick is dead.

The Peacekeepers push her into a waiting vehicle, its engine idling.

Finnick is dead.

Darkness, deeper than before. She’s not alone. She can hear them breathing, though she doesn’t know how many are with her. No one says anything, although one of them breathes with the odd hitching sound of someone who has been crying and can’t entirely stop. Annie knows the feeling well.

Finnick is dead.

A jolt. Everything rocks then settles. Annie opens her eyes onto a white-armored insect. Before she can stop herself she laughs. And laughs.

Finnick is dead dead dead deaddeaddead

She goes under.

xXx

Finnick stares at the half-full plate Plutarch abandoned when the device on his wrist beeped at him. He’d excused himself with no explanation, but Finnick had long since tuned both him and Haymitch out. Partially lulled by the deep hum and vibration of the hovercraft’s engines, his brain falls into old patterns, replaying over and over again the things he can do nothing about.

Had his father heeded his warnings and gotten everyone out? Or are they in Peacekeeper hands? Plutarch said Jo and the others were in Capitol custody, and he’d made it sound like a fact, but was it? Were they alive and, along with Annie, prisoners? Or were they dead, either from the lightning blast or Snow’s anger? Of course, if they are still alive, that could be far worse. And Annie…

Haymitch hadn’t actually said anything about her when Finnick asked, nor has he said anything since. Maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe Snow doesn’t have her at all. Martin is dead. Maybe Annie is… Finnick’s torturous thoughts stop short as though running into an invisible wall. Staring at the plate is a far better alternative to what he sees when he closes his eyes, but unlike his conscious thoughts, the mental images continue unbidden. His mind’s eye supplies him with unnaturally detailed images of Annie lying on the ground below the reaping stage, her blood seeping into the dirt, and later of her struggling to break free of the Peacekeeper carrying her to Snow. She’d broken the visor on the man’s helmet, leaving a smear of blood on the door jamb – blood that Finnick’s imagination now insists was enough to drip in bright red runnels down the woodwork.

He clenches his hands into fists under cover of the table, digging his nails into his palms, hoping the physical pain will stop the flow, but it doesn’t work. He sees Annie, still dripping from her arena, staring blankly at the ceiling. The only indication she was alive had been the faint rise and fall of her chest. Her body was in that hospital room, looking so small and fragile, but the surprising girl he’d met in the Training Center was gone, hiding inside herself. For months she’d fought hard to pull herself out of that internal abyss. The only voice she’d responded to was his. This time, he’s not there.

His vision blurs. Hot tears slip down Finnick’s cheeks to splash onto his wrist. Once the tears start, he can’t make them stop.

xXx

The smell of stale sweat. Coarse fabric scratches at cheek and nose, lips and chin. A blanket?

“But what’s going to happen to us?” A woman’s voice, thick and rough and pure Capitol.

“I shouldn’t even be here,” a male voice mutters. Shale? “I didn’t do anything.” A thud and something metal clatters. Annie huddles under her blanket, wishing for a better place to hide.

“And you think any of that matters, little man?” Another woman, her low voice unyielding and icy. She says something else laced with anger, but Annie sinks down again. Down and down and down.

xXx

Finnick stares at his hands. Both palms flat to the table and his fingers spread wide, he studies the green and yellow blobs of his knuckles, fading bruises from his fight with the punching bag after the Peacekeepers took Annie. The red lines, jagged and vaguely lightning-shaped, that crisscross the backs are new, as is the larger bloom of discoloration circling his right wrist and curving around the heel of his hand. He brings that hand closer to his eyes. The hair on the back is gone. Deep red marks surround pale blisters just starting to fill with fluid. He hadn’t noticed any of it when he dressed. Why doesn’t it hurt?

“The burns will heal.” Haymitch slides a bowl of steaming golden-brown liquid across the table toward Finnick and then resumes his seat. He takes a bite of something that looks like oatmeal, grayish and not-quite-solid, but then his lip curls in disgust and he shoves the bowl toward Plutarch’s abandoned plate. Finnick looks down at his own bowl and sniffs at the rising steam. Nothing is gray or congealed, and he’s pretty sure, based on smell alone, it’s some kind of broth. Maybe chicken. His stomach gurgles in anticipation.

“Most of the electricity went to the force field,” Haymitch continues, “but all of you took a hit.”

He doesn’t remember much. Running toward an unconscious Beetee as the air became more and more charged. Shouting for Katniss to get away from the tree. Katniss screaming for Peeta. A thousand-pound weight hitting him in the chest, shoving him backward and then pinning him to the ground. Katniss, bow in hand and arrow aimed at the sky, limned in white fire. And pain. Excruciating pain, just before everything went black.

Turning his hand over and over, tracing the lightning pattern with his eyes, Finnick asks Haymitch the question he’d asked himself. “Why doesn’t it hurt?”

“The medics gave you some powerful painkillers. Thirteen has better access to stuff like that than the rest of us. Pretty sure they make their own.”

“Thirteen?”

“Eat.” Haymitch nods toward the bowl of broth. Finnick dips a spoonful and lifts it to his lips, blowing on it before swallowing it down. “District Thirteen. We’re on their hovercraft.” Finnick looks at the older man sharply before dipping his spoon back into the bowl. The broth is salty and savory and tastes better than anything he can remember – mostly because he never thought he’d live to taste anything again.

“I thought District Thirteen was destroyed decades ago.” Plutarch had insisted, ages since, that he’d take care of getting them out of the arena if and when the force field fell, but he’d never told them how, not that Finnick had heard, anyway.

Haymitch glances around the small room, lighting on the door controls, the food and beverage dispensers in the corner, light fixtures, everything before leaning forward and fixing his eyes on Finnick. He’s tense and twitchy. His voice is just loud enough for Finnick to hear him when he says, “District Thirteen and the Capitol apparently have some kind of agreement. Or should I say ‘had?’ Turns out Plutarch is twistier than any of us thought. He’s originally from Thirteen, not the Capitol.” Finnick frowns but doesn’t interrupt. If Haymitch hadn’t known about this before, he can’t blame him for being so twitchy, acting as though there are hidden listening devices everywhere. “Thirteen has been watching us for a while, biding their time. They—”

When the door opens behind him, Haymitch stops talking, leaving Finnick to wonder whether “us” refers to the rebels or the other districts. The victor from 12 leans back in his chair, the picture of innocence, as Plutarch Heavensbee breezes in. The ex-Gamemaker tosses a folder onto the table and heads for the dispensers. Coffee in hand, he swings a chair out and sits before opening the folder. Finnick catches a glimpse of what looks like a chart before Plutarch shuts it again, one palm flat on the folder and a single sheet of paper in his other hand.

“Communications are down in Seven, Ten, and Twelve,” he says, looking from Haymitch to Finnick and back down at the paper. Finnick can’t help but notice how relaxed he seems to be, in spite of the edge of excitement in his voice. It’s a sharp contrast to Haymitch with his air of secrecy. “But Eleven has control of transportation now,” Plutarch continues, “so there’s at least a hope of them getting some food out.”

A surge of hope flows through Finnick. No matter where Plutarch is from, if he’s getting reports from the districts… Heart pounding, voice rough from the electricity burns and the intensity of his emotions, he asks, “What about Four? My family?” He swallows hard, wanting more water but not trusting himself to pick up the cup. “Can you take me there?”

“No, I'm sorry. There’s no way I can get you to Four. But I’ve given special orders for their retrieval if possible. It’s the best I can do, Finnick.”

Finnick laughs, the sound harsh and broken. “’If possible?’ First you lose Annie. Now you can’t help my family?” He slumps back in his chair. “I should just fucking kill myself. Then Snow won’t have a reason to hunt them.” He stares at his barely touched broth until it dissolves in more hot tears. “If I’m dead, maybe he won’t hurt Annie.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Haymitch growls at him. There’s fear in his voice. There has only been one other time in Finnick’s life he thought seriously about suicide, and Haymitch was there then, too. “That’s the worst thing you could do. Get her killed for sure. As long as you’re alive, they’ll keep her alive for bait.”

For bait.

Finnick slumps even further, stopping when the back of his head hits the chair back. Haymitch and Plutarch continue to talk, but Finnick tunes them out again.

Haymitch is right. Snow will try to use Annie as bait to lure Finnick back to the Capitol, to push him into doing something stupid. But he’s right about something else, too: she’ll be alive.

But at what cost?

xXx

Music. A siren’s song. Instead of dragging her down ever further until she drowns, the haunting voice draws her up. Diamond bright and shining like a beacon through the darkness that surrounds her, it draws Annie in. Impulsively, she adds her own voice to it, brittle and rough and barely audible, as she would when Finnick would sing after a nightmare, hers or his didn’t matter. For a moment, the siren’s voice falters, but then it resumes between one breath and the next.

In the corner of a barred cell, covered by a thin wool blanket not large enough to act as a barrier between her and the concrete floor, Annie feels the cold seep into her bones. It’s nothing compared to the cold that shrivels her soul at the memory of President Snow and his “regret.” Finnick is dead, electrocuted when the arena fell. Annie curls tighter into herself and waits for the siren to drag her down into death, too.

“I promise you, Annie, I will come home to you if I can.” She can almost feel the warmth of his hands when he cupped her face between his palms, hear the tears in his voice as her own slipped from her closed eyes. The memory is so strong Annie raises her hands to curl her fingers around his wrists, but she catches herself, curling them around each other instead. “But if I die—” She hadn’t wanted to face the possibility he might not come back. “—I need you to promise me that you’ll live your life. Live it for me, if you have to, until you can live it for yourself.” She doesn’t want to face the reality of it now. She made him a promise that day, but neither of them expected anything like this.

Movement a few inches away distracts her, and Annie watches a brown spider make its way along the floor toward the bars of the cell. It transitions from flat floor to vertical bar with ease, climbing in a circular path around and around the bar. When it reaches the ceiling, the spider drops rapidly. It spins as it swings and it spins as it spins, playing out more silk until it reaches the next bar and grabs hold. A snort of rusty laughter escapes Annie as she watches the spider’s aerial dance, perfectly timed to the siren’s song.

The siren stops singing.

“Annie?” A male voice – the questioner and the siren are not the same.

Annie holds her breath. It’s a familiar voice, the questioner’s, but his name won’t come. After a few moments of silence – Annie can almost hear the spider’s legs scratching at the metal bars as it weaves its web – the siren’s song begins again and, before her vision whites out completely with the lack of air, Annie draws in a breath.

A guttural sound of frustration interrupts the siren. “Stop it! Stop that damn noise! You’re driving me crazy!” Shale. Annie is sure the voice belongs to Shale, but she can’t see him from where she lies.

“Please don’t stop,” she says aloud. “I like it.”

She hadn’t meant to say any of it out loud, but the siren begins again, each song blending into the next. Her voice is low and smoky, soothing. Annie starts to relax. She doesn’t listen to the words, just the sounds, notes following each other up and down and around. She watches the spider weave her web, up and down and around.

Her eyes drift closed as the siren continues to sing and the spider to weave. Annie’s muscles go lax. She sleeps.

xXx

The door crashes open and Finnick jumps, catching an elbow painfully against the edge of the table. Katniss stumbles into the room, clinging to the doorknob with one hand, her eyes wild with fear and confusion. Her expression reminds him uncomfortably of the jungle, jabberjays all around them, and he finds himself bracing for the birds to attack.

“Done knocking yourself out, sweetheart?” Concern is foremost in Haymitch’s voice, although he tries to cover it with a scowl. Finnick has heard that tone many times over the years.

Katniss, brandishing some kind of weapon, responds by rushing Haymitch like a wounded animal lashing out at the nearest target. Haymitch catches her by the wrists, both preventing her from hurting him, at least physically, as well as from falling.

Haymitch shoots a skeptical glance at Katniss’ weapon of choice. “So it's you and a syringe against the Capitol? See, this is why no one lets you make the plans.” She stares at him in confusion. “Drop it,” Haymitch orders, tightening his grip. All the fight in her disappears abruptly as she gasps and releases the syringe. Haymitch kicks it away and pushes her down into a chair next to Finnick.

Plutarch sets a bowl of broth and a roll in front of her with a glance at Haymitch, and while she eats, the two of them bring her up to speed. Finnick zones out for most of it. They don’t need him to talk. He’s just as happy to listen, sipping at his own broth and trying hard not to think.

“I still don't understand why Peeta and I weren’t let in on the plan.” Katniss’ voice is harsh, breaking through Finnick’s wall of not-thought. It’s something he and Johanna had both wondered about, deciding that Haymitch understood his fellow 12 victors better than they could. But that deception in particular had never sat right with either of them, both having far too much experience with others directing their lives without any regard to what they might want.

“Because once the force field blew,” Haymitch says, “you’d be the first ones they’d try to capture, and the less you knew, the better.”

“The first ones? Why?” She looks back and forth between Haymitch and Plutarch.

“For the same reason the rest of us agreed to die to keep you alive,” Finnick rasps out, drawing her attention to him.

“No, Johanna tried to kill me.” Frowning, raising a hand almost unconsciously to her head, she turns her confusion on Finnick. For a moment, she looks so much like Annie looking to him for reassurance, for the truth, that his heart twists. He starts to answer her, but Haymitch is quicker.

“Johanna knocked you out to cut the tracker from your arm,” he says, “and lead Brutus and Enobaria away from you.”

“What?” She shakes her head, a negation, and presses both thumbs into her temples. Finnick doesn’t blame her; he has a pretty nasty headache, too. “I don’t know what you're—”

“We had to save you because you’re the mockingjay, Katniss,” Plutarch interrupts, his voice gentle. “While you live, the revolution lives.”

Katniss drops her hands to the table and just stares at him. Finnick watches the play of emotions across her face, so easy to read. More confusion, some anger, a flicker of something that makes him think she wants to run far away and hide from them all, and then a dawning understanding of what that really means as she whispers Peeta’s name.

“The others kept Peeta alive because, if he died, we knew there’d be no keeping you in an alliance,” Haymitch admits. “And we couldn’t risk leaving you unprotected.” The sentiment is brutal, implying that Peeta’s life was nothing more than an afterthought, disposable in the face of Katniss’ survival. Finnick sees the color drain from Haymitch’s face, leaving his skin ashen; he knows just how hard it was for Haymitch to leave Peeta behind. Even so, he can’t help the petty thought that Haymitch deserves that pain now, for Peeta, for Johanna. For Annie.

“Where is Peeta?” Katniss hisses, glaring at her mentor. Her fingers clench and unclench as a growing rage pushes every other emotion aside.

“He was picked up by the Capitol,” Haymitch says, dropping his gaze, “along with Johanna and Enobaria.”

Plutarch’s attention is on Haymitch during the brief exchange, but by the end of it, Finnick watches Katniss. Her agitation at the start becomes something harder edged, and when Haymitch makes his final admission, Finnick sees her rage boil over. She launches herself at Haymitch, fingers curved into claws that rake across his face, but Finnick is already diving for her, his chair clattering to the floor. Sprawled half across the table, he grabs hold of one arm, yanking her away from Haymitch, but he can’t maintain his grip. She breaks free and goes for Haymitch again, and it takes Finnick and Plutarch both to drag the girl off him, but not before she damages his face. From the look in Haymitch’s eyes, the damage inside is far worse.

xXx

“Get back! Face the wall!”

Annie wakes to chaos as Peacekeepers herd her fellow prisoners away from the cell door. She tries to huddle under her blanket, but a white-armored guard whips it away and grabs her by the arm, dragging her to her feet. He shoves her toward the wall; only her outthrust arm stops her from hitting it face first. She steadies herself between a pale woman with metallic gold hair and a tall, slender woman with dark skin and close-cropped black hair. A man farther down the line of prisoners to her right begins to cry.

The surface in front of her is a rough, particulate gray, but the particles consist of all shapes and shades: dark, light, and everything in between. The urge to trace her fingertips over the surface is strong, but she feels the guards behind her, smells the oily metal of their guns. She keeps her hands at her sides.

“Annie Cresta,” one of them says. Annie stiffens and holds her breath, but she doesn’t move. “Shale Arris. Take one step back from the wall.”

No one moves. The man at the other end of the line chokes on a sob.

“Victors Cresta and Arris, take one step back from the wall. Do it now.”

When neither Annie nor Shale steps back, another Peacekeeper jacks a round into its chamber, an unmistakable sound; she heard it a lifetime ago in District 4 and again more recently in the victors’ lounge. Remembering the feel of the rifle in her hands, the kick when she shot the guards, Annie shivers, but she can’t quite make herself take that single step. They can’t mean to punish me, not if they want Shale, too, she tells herself. As he keeps insisting, he did nothing.

On the other side of the gold-haired woman, Shale steps away from the wall, bringing him into Annie’s peripheral vision. “What do you want with us?” he demands. Beneath the typical District 2 arrogance lies uncertainty.

The Peacekeeper’s answer consists of yanking Shale’s arms behind his back and locking his wrists into metal cuffs. Yet another guard slings her rifle over her shoulder and leads Shale from the cell, the victor protesting his unfair treatment as they go.

“Victor Cresta. Now. Or I shoot the crying one.”

Straightening her shoulders, Annie turns to face the Peacekeepers. There remain three guards in addition to the one giving the orders – one woman and two other men. Stepping toward the man in charge, Annie offers her wrists. She doesn’t look at him, instead choosing to focus on her fellow prisoners. In addition to the women she stood between – if she gets the chance, she’ll learn their names – two men she’s never seen before stand with Rafe Simons, Finnick’s stylist. Rafe’s eyes meet Annie’s and he pulls himself up a little straighter, almost as though that brief glance gives him strength. His face is wet with tears.

One of the guards cuffs her wrists behind her back; they handle her more gently than they did Shale. The other prisoners remain silent as the Peacekeepers lead Annie away, but she can’t help a surge of – hope? gratitude? – when the dark-skinned woman raises her right hand, three fingers extended in a salute.

Annie doesn’t want to hear the sickening sound of a rifle butt meeting flesh, but that sound, too, is all too familiar. The woman crumples to the floor. The cell door clangs shut.

xXx

Finnick lies awake, staring up into the darkness and listening to the thrum of the engines and the breathing of his friends. Some of his friends. He wishes desperately that Johanna and Peeta were here, too, but they’re not. They’re in the Capitol awaiting interrogation, and that’s only if Snow cares enough for them to be relatively healthy before the questions start.

“Katniss. Katniss, I’m sorry.” He knows she’s awake. He hears her restless movements as she tests the straps that hold her down, preventing her from hurting herself – or Haymitch – again. Even drugged as she is, she can no more sleep than he can, not with her fear for Peeta circling around and around in her mind. Just like his for Johanna. He forces away thoughts of Snow interrogating Annie. “I wanted to go back for him and Johanna, but I couldn’t move.” Paralyzed by the shock of the lightning, muscles locked, he’d tried to scream at their rescuers to not leave them, but even that had been impossible.

“It’s better for him than Johanna,” he continues. “They’ll figure out he doesn’t know anything pretty fast. And they won’t kill him if they think they can use him against you.” His voice tries to break at the end, but he doesn’t let it, forcing strength into the words along with breath.

“Like bait?” she responds, unrelenting. “Like how they’ll use Annie for bait, Finnick?”

Her words stab him in the heart, bringing all of his fears for Annie crashing down. He bites back a cry of pain, but the tide is too strong. “I wish she was dead,” he whispers. “I wish they were all dead and we were, too. It would be best.” It would be best. Annie is more valuable to Snow alive than dead, and once he knows she knows nothing of the rebellion, nothing worth anything, her life will no longer be in danger. But he knows all too well what that means.

Rolling onto his side, Finnick turns his back on Katniss Everdeen, burying his face – and his sobs – in his pillow.

xXx

The door opens, admitting a tall woman with blue-black hair and eyes to match, skin the color of old ivory and a too-white smile. Her physical modifications are more subtle than most, as is the shimmering midnight suit she wears, but Annie doesn’t find that subtlety at all reassuring; it speaks to her of power and wealth that has no need to be flashy.

“Miss Cresta?” The shimmering woman extends a hand toward Annie. “I’m Melissa Muhti.”

Annie, curled up in a chair with her arms around her knees, stares at Muhti’s proffered hand but makes no move to accept it. She’s heard that name before, but the when and the where won’t come. Muhti lowers her hand and raises one perfect eyebrow. Her smile twists a little at one corner, turning the expression into something less friendly.

“I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

Not believing for a moment that this polished Capitol woman cares how long she’s been waiting, Annie stares through her, mentally fixing her gaze to a nonexistent spot on the opposite wall as she tries to chase down that niggling familiarity. She’s only half paying attention when Muhti closes the door and crosses to the desk, picking up a folder to read the notes there. With a quick glance at Annie she says, “President Snow asked me to make sure none of this blood,” – she nods toward Annie’s clothes – “is yours.”

Annie gives her nothing. They’ll use whatever she says against her, so it’s better to remain silent. When it becomes clear Annie doesn’t intend to respond, Muhti picks up a pen and scribbles something into the file, but before she can say anything more, the telephone on her desk buzzes.

“I’m in the middle of—” Falling abruptly silent, she sinks down onto the edge of her desk. “Yes, of course. Please put him through.” Half a second later, her smile back in place, she greets the cause of the interruption. “Cori! What can I do for you?” Still staring toward her invisible spot, Annie lets Muhti’s side of the conversation wash over her. Not only is the woman’s name familiar, so is the way she speaks to whoever is on the other end of the call.

Hearing her own name mentioned, Annie’s eyes flicker toward Muhti’s face just long enough to see a frown mar her smooth features. She starts to protest whatever she just heard, but that’s when Annie remembers.

“Is that Annie Cresta? Henrik and I would dearly love to meet her, once the Games are over.”

Shuddering, Annie curls in on herself more tightly, but quickly regrets it. The smell of the blood on her clothes, the anxiety she’s lived under these past few hours – days – combine with the near certainty that Snow will sell her to this woman and her Henrik. Annie’s stomach rolls. She hasn’t eaten anything in she doesn’t know how long, but that doesn’t lessen the sudden nausea.

She must have made a sound. A trashcan appears in front of her, and she reaches for it in something of a panic, but nothing comes up except acid and bile. She spits it out and fruitlessly retches again. Wiping her mouth with the back of one shaking hand, she glances at Melissa Muhti, who watches her expressionlessly.

After a moment of staring at each other, Muhti reaches over and picks up the telephone handset once more. “Neva, please bring me a change of clothes.” A pause. “No. Everything from the skin out.” Returning the handset to its cradle, she leans back in her chair. The whole time she spoke, she watched Annie. “Have you been sick to your stomach before this?”

Annie closes her eyes but doesn’t answer. She looks away from Muhti’s dark eyes to glance around the small office. A framed photograph of a man and boy rests on the corner of the desk beside a small lamp. Stacks of paper, some only a few sheets tall, others an inch or more, cover the desk’s surface. Half a dozen books stand between a pair of bookends near the telephone. There’s a painting on the wall to the right, an abstract of dark shadows mixed with bright blues and grays that reminds Annie of a summer storm. An exaggerated sigh draws Annie’s attention back to Muhti.

“I can’t help you, Miss Cresta, if you won’t talk to me.”

Instead of answering her, Annie begins to hum. She doesn’t know quite why she does it; she just feels it’s a safer course than anything she might say. It takes her a moment before she realizes it’s the same tune the siren sang in their concrete cell.

Someone knocks on the door before opening it, and a young woman enters carrying a stack of clothing that she sets on the desk.

“Thank you, Neva.” Muhti says nothing else until Neva closes the door on her way out, and then she turns to Annie. “I believe you and I are of a similar size, so these should fit you.” She reaches out to touch Annie’s hair, but Annie jerks her head away so violently the chair she sits in rocks back as well. Muhti raises both hands in surrender before lowering them into her lap.

“Fine. You don’t have to talk to me, and I won’t touch you except as necessary in my examination. But there will be a physical examination, Miss Cresta. Neither of us has any choice in that.” She stands, picking up the stack of clothing. “And I would think you’d like a shower, if only to wash the blood from your hair.”

Chapter Text

Chapter 2 – Waiting and Fading and Floating Away

Annie leans her head back against the wall and closes her eyes. She’s tired of watching her Peacekeeper guard flirt with Dr. Muhti’s assistant, Neva, but there isn’t anything else for her to do but wait. The doctor is in her office, going over notes and charts and test results, leaving Annie to wonder what comes next. Other than during her recovery after the Games, she’s never seen a real doctor before, not for herself anyway. District 4 might be one of the better off districts in Panem, but it was still a backwater compared to the Capitol.

Dr. Muhti had asked Annie plenty of questions, but she wouldn’t answer any in return. Nothing happening to Annie makes sense, and she’s beginning to believe this is how it starts, not with some obvious method of torture, but with something more mundane, like waiting. And waiting. And yet more waiting. I should be used to waiting. The voices of her guard and Neva pause for a moment when Annie laughs.

Sometimes it feels as though her entire life has become nothing but waiting. Waiting to be too old for reaping, and when that didn’t matter anymore, waiting for her Games to begin. Once in the arena, she waited for death to find her, to escape the fear. Later, there were all those times spent alone or with Mags or Finnick’s family, waiting for Finnick to come home. Worst of all was waiting for him to come back from yet another arena. Now she simply waits for the Peacekeepers to take her back to her cell. I hate waiting. She tries her best to ignore the little voice inside her head telling her she won’t have to wait for Finnick to come home ever again.

The office door opens beside her and Annie jumps, her gaze focusing almost immediately on Neva and the guard. The women exchange a guilty look before the Peacekeeper straightens, taking a step back from the desk, while Neva busily shuffles papers.

“Neva,” Dr. Muhti says, “make arrangements to take Miss Cresta to…” She hesitates for just a breath too long between words; it’s barely noticeable, but even in the brief time Annie has known her, that hesitation stands out. “… the obstetrics unit in Asclepius General. A private room.” Annie looks up at her, but Muhti won’t meet her gaze. Before Annie has a chance to ask her why, she disappears back into her office, firmly closing the door.

Unwilling to let it rest, Annie swings up from her chair. She raps on the door while behind her Neva makes the requested arrangements. Annie’s heart beats faster as fear begins to rise. She’s fine. She’s perfectly healthy. None of the blood on her clothes or in her hair was her own. The obstetrics unit?

“Doctor Muhti?” The doctor doesn’t answer even when Annie pounds on the door. The guard comes toward her, her armor rattling slightly, and Annie twists the knob, almost falling through the opening when the unexpectedly unlocked door swings inward.

Melissa Muhti doesn’t look up from the folder resting between her hands, which lie flat on either side of it; her fingertips and knuckles are white with the pressure she uses to keep them that way.

“Why are you sending me to a hospital?” Annie demands, raising a hand to her abdomen almost unconsciously. I can’t be pregnant. But she’s been so tired lately, and the nausea… She had thought it was all nerves from the Games, from watching over Finnick, unable to do anything, but what if it’s something more? Please.

Muhti continues to read her notes as though Annie isn’t there. Fear morphs into terror. I can’t be pregnant. What will Snow do to me? What will he do to our baby? The one time she’d pushed the subject of pregnancy with Finnick, he’d told her not to worry, had said it wouldn’t be an issue and quickly changed the subject. Any talk of children was always someday or if there were no Hunger Games, never what if it happens anyway?

“Am I pregnant?” she blurts out, unable to contain her anxiety any longer.

Dr. Muhti closes her eyes for just a second, as though she’s steeling herself for something unpleasant. She balls her right hand into a fist, crumpling the piece of paper beneath it. When she turns to face Annie, she doesn’t even bother to look her in the eyes, instead choosing to look at a spot over her right shoulder.

“Annie, you’re in the beginning stages of a miscarriage.” Her voice fades a bit when she continues. “I’ll do everything I can for you, but there’s nothing I can do to save the baby.”

xXx

Finnick opens his eyes, uncertain what woke him. He hears Katniss panting beside him, short and sharp as if she’s running from something in her sleep. Beyond her, Beetee’s breathing is steady; he murmurs something, but Finnick can’t make out the words. He’s not sure the older man’s vocalizations even are words.

Sitting up, he lets his eyes adjust to the gloom. The only light comes from the corridor outside, slipping through the eye-level window in the door. Katniss’ chest rises and falls irregularly; he leans toward her, stretching out a hand to gently shake her shoulder, generally a bad idea with any victor, but her wrists are still strapped to the bed. She kicked her thin blanket to the floor, but he’s not fool enough to get in range of her feet.

“Katniss, let it go. It’s just a nightmare.”

Waking, she sucks in a sharp breath and holds it, jerking against the restraints. “Peet…?” Her voice, still a little mushy from sleep and the drugs one of Plutarch’s people gave her earlier, trails off as she remembers. “Finnick? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know.” Listening more intently, Finnick holds up a hand to silence her, even though she probably can’t see it in the dark. Behind him, Beetee moans and then subsides, the sound louder than Finnick would have expected from a dozen feet away. A door opens and closes outside their room. There’s no engine noise, no vibration rising up from the floor. “We’ve landed.” He focuses on Katniss again, lying motionless now on her bed, her face turned toward the rectangle of light in the door. “Welcome to District Thirteen,” he says with a humorless snort of laughter.

xXx

The hospital room is small but relatively comfortable, much nicer than the one they put her Gran in when she had the heart attack. It was only a few weeks after Annie’s Games, and Finnick had been in the Capitol. Borrowing Finnick’s speed boat, Mags and Annie had rushed her to District 4’s only hospital. Once the hospital staff had stabilized her, they set her up to wait on a cot in a room with three other patients while they called in a specialist from the Capitol. None of them had the training for anything that couldn’t be stitched or splinted. Gran had died before the specialist ever set foot on a hoverplane.

In addition to the bed and monitoring equipment, there is a table, a lamp, and a single chair. Annie has neither window nor television, no radio, not even the illusion of the outside world. There’s an old-fashioned clock on the wall next to the door, but its hands remain frozen at nine thirty-three. She has no visitors, sees no one but Dr. Muhti, a couple of technicians, and the Peacekeepers assigned to guard her door, who she only glimpses briefly when that door opens. She can’t decide if the Peacekeepers are there to keep her in or to keep others out. No one speaks to her; Annie is sure they’re under orders not to. Eventually she gives up trying to get any of them to answer her questions.

She wakes screaming in the middle of the first night with a tearing pain across her abdomen. No one comes to answer her screams – they’re already there, both Dr. Muhti and an older man, one of the techs. The doctor presses Annie back into the bed with a gentle hand to her shoulder while the man adjusts a bag of clear fluid attached to Annie’s arm by way of a thin plastic tube and a needle. She doesn’t ask what’s happening. There’s no point. The doctor already told her she was having a miscarriage. Another pain rips through her, bringing tears to her eyes, but this time she doesn’t scream.

xXx

Having become used to the relatively dim lighting and the quiet atmosphere on the hovercraft, Finnick is unprepared for the wall of light and sound that hits him as he follows Haymitch down the ramp to the ground. Blinking rapidly against the harsh light, he resists the urge to raise his hands to cover his ears, like Annie, against the noise. Haymitch stops to talk to the gray-uniformed men wheeling both Katniss and Beetee on gurneys to somewhere they presumably will receive real medical attention. When Finnick starts to follow them, Plutarch places a hand on his arm.

“President Coin wants to speak with you, Finnick.” The older man doesn’t seem to notice his slight flinch at the casual and unexpected touch.

President Coin? Aloud he asks, “Why me?”

Turning away, Heavensbee doesn’t answer as he walks with purpose toward a set of double doors near the far corner of the chamber. It isn’t clear whether he’s avoiding the question or simply didn’t hear it.

Men and women in gray uniforms are everywhere, unloading the hovercraft, checking the landing gear, and doing who knows what with similar vehicles throughout the cavernous hangar. Given that the rest of the districts know next to nothing about District 13 and that what little film footage they have is decades old, Finnick is fairly sure they’re deep underground. Someone would have noticed anything this big on the surface.

Hurrying to catch up with Plutarch, Finnick almost collides with a woman rounding another hovercraft. Although she never breaks her stride, he stumbles in avoiding the impact and only recovers when Haymitch steadies him with a hand to his elbow, briefly held and then released.

“You should join the others in the infirmary, Finnick,” Haymitch suggests. “Maybe leave meeting the president for later?”

Finnick waves off his concern. “I’m fine, old man.” He shoots him what he hopes is a cocky grin, although it probably looks more like a grimace. “I eat politicians for breakfast, remember?” He winces when the words don’t sound quite as funny as they did in his head. Haymitch raises one dark eyebrow, but says nothing.

“Not like this one, Finnick,” Plutarch responds, having stopped to wait for them. “Alma Coin is very different from Coriolanus Snow.” Finnick fights the urge to roll his eyes. I doubt that.

An older man with a military bearing stops near Heavensbee, introducing himself to Finnick and Haymitch as Commander Boggs. After a brief conversation with Plutarch, Boggs leads them deeper into the complex to a room with a large table, lit from within, in the center of the room. The walls are lined with monitors. Other than the table, it reminds Finnick very much of the mentors’ control room in the Hunger Games Headquarters building. Several people stand off to one side, discussing a map at the center of the table.

“Wait here,” Boggs says, raising one hand palm out. When Plutarch nods, Boggs heads toward the cluster of people, stopping beside a woman with longish iron gray hair. He gestures toward Finnick and the others as he speaks.

“Alma Coin,” Plutarch says, his voice soft and low as he nods toward the gray-haired woman, “can be blunt and even harsh, but she is indisputably in charge here. Without her approval, we wouldn’t have had the resources we needed to get you and the others out of the arena, Finnick.”

“Not all of the others,” Finnick reminds him, the words leaving a bitter taste in his mouth. He thinks of Johanna, who really is guilty of treason; of Peeta, who they’d all agreed to give their lives to keep safe, just as they had Katniss; and of Enobaria, who had decided at the last minute to join them. They’ll all three certainly be interrogated, with all that entails, but if any of the Games feeds had picked up the low-voiced conversation he’d had with Enobaria, she’s as good as dead. Snow can at least use the other two for leverage.

Boggs motions them over. Coin glances at Plutarch and Haymitch briefly, and then she focuses her full attention on Finnick, her pale gray eyes traveling from head to toe and back again. Her expression doesn’t change.

“So you’re Finnick Odair.” She turns toward Heavensbee. “How is the girl?” She glances at Finnick once more, pale eyes full of speculation. Speculative looks are nothing new to him, but perhaps not in this context.

Finnick tenses and Haymitch shifts beside him. “What are you—?”

Before Finnick can say anything else, a sharp tone sounds and the walls of monitors suddenly change to a single scene, repeated over and over, showing first the seal of Panem and then a crawl of words across the bottom of the screens: Breaking News. The seal fades into the face of the Capitol’s most respected newscaster, Wilmina Jerdann. If the rest of the Capitol knew her as well as Finnick does, he’s sure that respect would die pretty quickly. He fights not to scratch at his suddenly crawling skin.

“Citizens of Panem,” she begins, “we have learned that just a few hours ago one of the strongholds of the disturbance in District Four fell to our Peacekeeper forces. A tribunal has convicted the ringleaders of treason and sentenced them to death. We take you now live to District Four, where those executions are just moments away.”

A flicker and the scene changes to the square in front of District 4’s Justice Building, a place Finnick knows well. At least, he knew it well in another life. Things have changed. The Justice Building itself is half in ruins, as are many of the surrounding buildings. There are holes in the streets, hastily patched so the armored Peacekeeper vehicles can patrol, as they’re doing now in the background. The people of 4 gather in the square, herded there by armed Peacekeepers. At the center of the crowd stands a gallows.

Peacekeepers lead three people onto the gallows, but Finnick only has eyes for one as Wilmina Jerdann’s voice intones, “The leader of the insurgents in Four is Enrique Odair, uncle to Hunger Games victor Finnick Odair, who is himself missing. It is as yet unclear whether Victor Odair is even alive or if he is aligned with the insurgents.”

A wordless sound of protest escapes Finnick as a Peacekeeper settles the noose around Uncle Rick’s neck and tightens it down as two other guards hold him steady. The sound quality is good enough to hear it when the executioner asks if Rick has any last words.

“Fuck you! Fuck all of you! We will no longer stand by and let you murder our children for your fucking entertainment!” One of the guards throws a black hood over Rick’s head, but he fights them, still shouting as they tighten the noose. “Down with the Capitol! We’re stronger than you! We will fight you!” Finnick feels someone step up close beside him, not quite touching, and glances away from the myriad screens long enough to identify Haymitch. The older man squeezes his shoulder; glad of the support, Finnick doesn’t pull away.

The white-armored guards take a step back and Rick stumbles, but he rights himself to stand tall until the floor drops from beneath his feet and he falls. The microphones, every bit as good as the ones used in the arena, pick up a sharp crack. Blinded by tears, Finnick doesn’t see the end as he cries “NO!” over and over, not caring that more than a dozen strangers are suddenly staring at him. He falls to his knees, barely registering Haymitch calling his name. Finnick stops shouting as the scene freezes on the image of the man who taught him bawdy sea shanties and how to fish with a spear swaying dead at the end of a rope.

xXx

Annie stares at an imaginary spot in the space before her as her Peacekeeper guards wheel her past the stark white walls of a brightly lit corridor; it smells of antiseptic beneath a heavy floral perfume. If the perfume had smelled of roses, Annie might have had no choice but to vomit on the pristine tile floor and her guards’ boots. She wears a pale gray tunic and pants an Avox had brought, the only spot of not-white to be seen. The clothes are replacements for both Dr. Muhti’s borrowed ones and the simple hospital gown she’d worn since her arrival. They’d probably long since disposed of the clothes she’d arrived in, bloody as they’d been. Moving in a kind of fog, Annie had let them dress her, following their commands without resistance. Finnick is dead. Their baby is dead. What can they do to her worse than that?

They pass no one as they move into what must be an underground tunnel, based on the smell of diesel that slowly replaces the scent of antiseptic flowers. Maybe they’re going to bury me. Annie starts to laugh, almost welcoming the thought, but quickly stops as the muscles in her abdomen tighten, causing a twinge of pain. She digs her fingers into her thighs in anticipation of more pain to come – the manacles she wears don’t allow her to reach the arms of the chair – but the discomfort fades. There never was any blood, but the constant pain that started the night she woke screaming had only just begun to subside when Dr. Muhti released her to the Peacekeepers this morning. She’s just as glad no one suggested she walk to wherever it is they’re taking her.

Pushing through a set of double doors, her guards – one of them Neva’ s girlfriend, the other a man who had joined them here – stop at a windowless white transport vehicle emblazoned with the Peacekeeper seal, a bronze shield superimposed over the seal of Panem.

“I think she’s the last one,” a third Peacekeeper says after consulting a clipboard. He hands it to Neva’s girlfriend. “Sign here.” He looks down at Annie. “This one another victor? She doesn’t look so tough.” A sharp retort swims to the front of her mind too slowly to act on. It wouldn’t do her any good to say it anyway. At the moment, his dismissive observation is nothing but the truth.

Neva’s girlfriend wheels Annie around to the back of the van while the other guard laughs. The driver tosses his clipboard into the van and hurries around to open the doors in back onto five people already inside. Annie recognizes three of them. She pauses in the act of climbing into the van, her gaze lighting on Peeta Mellark while a sickening surge of adrenaline flows through her. She gasps. Neva’s girlfriend shoves her into the open seat beside Enobaria and locks her in place.

“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Johanna Mason says as the doors slam shut.

Chapter Text

Chapter 3 - Stones Instead of Bones

When they arrive at their destination, there is confusion on the part of the Peacekeepers at the receiving end as to where to put Annie and the other victors. The driver insists their paperwork says to deliver the prisoners and return to base immediately; the guards on site insist they have no paperwork and have to wait for orders from above. Johanna shouts critiques and rude suggestions that make Annie laugh, wincing at the hysterical edge.

In the end, the Peacekeepers herd the manacled victors into the building, down a long hallway to a large elevator, and finally into what looks like the same cell Annie was in before, although she’s a little fuzzy on the details. The same people are there, though, strengthening that impression: Finnick’s stylist, Rafe; Atala Renlo, former assistant to the Head Gamemaker; fellow victors Shale and Silke; and the blonde woman Peeta greets as Effie, who enfolds him in an overwrought hug. It isn’t until Enobaria greets the Gamemaker by name, expressing surprise at finding her here with “these rebels,” that Annie recognizes Atala as her siren. Enobaria’s comment starts a chorus of protest from Shale and the golden Effie that they’re no rebels. Silke remains silent where she sits on the floor in the corner of the cell, her expression unreadable as she watches.

Annie slips past the other prisoners to the far corner and slides down the wall. Drawing her knees up to her chest, she tries to make herself small enough to disappear, but Shale follows her, positioning himself against the wall, not quite close enough for their shoulders to touch. She wants to tell him to go away, but she doesn’t want to talk to anyone, so she merely shifts away from him, leaning against the wall and hiding her face between her knees.

“Where did they take you?” he asks, either ignoring or not picking up on her signals to leave her alone.

“Go away, Shale,” she mutters to her knees.

“You were gone for three days.” Ignoring then, but at least she knows now how long she was in that hospital. “So where were you? What happened? What did they do to you?”

What did they do to me? She feels again the shock of when Dr. Muhti uttered the word miscarriage, the pain ripping through her, tearing her apart that first night, just as despair rips though her now. Finnick is dead, and the only part of him she might have been able to hold onto – save for memories that will inevitably fade – is gone. What did they do to me? They destroyed me. But aloud she says only, “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“They gave me a physical, just to make sure none of the blood on my clothes was mine, but then they brought me straight back here.” Annie curls up more tightly, her fingers digging into her arms so hard she can feel the tiny crescents of pain where her nails threaten to break through her skin. “At least I got some clean clothes out of it, right?” He won’t stop talking. Loosening her grip on her arms, Annie lifts her hands to cover her ears, pressing hard to block out the sound of his voice.

“Hey, Rocks for Brains.” Johanna approaches from where she had been leaning against the bars and kicks the sole of Shale’s shoe; Annie sees it through the space between her ankles. “Leave her alone.”

“I don’t have to answer to—”

She kicks him in the shin. “She obviously doesn’t want to talk. Now leave her the fuck alone.”

Annie’s muscles begin to tremble with the need to escape, but there’s no place to go. She sways, rocking forward then back, trapped between Shale and the wall. A scream starts to build in her chest, clawing its way up her throat. The tears she couldn’t shed for Finnick, for the child who never had a chance to be, burn behind her eyes. Squeezing them shut, she rocks harder, faster, clenching her teeth together to keep the scream from escaping. Her grief is hers; she doesn’t want to share it with these others. With the possible exception of Johanna, they are not her friends.

Muffled voices. Air movement. A subtle change in temperature to her left and the feeling of open space around her. Annie leans to the right, her head and shoulder against the wall. She has no idea how long she rocked or when she stopped, how long Johanna and Shale argued. It frightens her, losing track of herself like that. Opening eyes sticky with dried tears, she drops her hands to her knees. Her muscles ache from holding so tightly to one position. Her throat is scratchy, and she has the slightly panicked thought that the scream must have escaped after all.

Lifting her head, Annie looks around, almost immediately meeting the concerned gaze of Johanna where she sits on the floor a few feet away, apparently keeping an eye on her. Or standing guard, Annie thinks, choking down a laugh. Enobaria and Silke have Shale corralled in Silke’s corner of the cell. He shakes his head at something Enobaria says, launching into a string of words Annie is too far away to hear. No one but Johanna seems to pay any attention to Annie.

Pushing up from the floor, a moment later Johanna hunkers down in front of her. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asks softly, her voice pitched so only Annie can hear. “It’s okay to say no.”

In the face of Johanna’s kindness, the fact that she isn’t expecting anything from her, the words and the pain pour from Annie. Martin’s death, killing the Peacekeepers, being so close to escape only to have it snatched away – Johanna snorts at that but doesn’t otherwise interrupt the flood of words – President Snow gloating over Finnick’s death by electrocution. Finally, her voice barely audible even to herself, Annie tells Johanna about the miscarriage.

Through it all, Johanna listens. When Annie falls silent, her tears flowing freely, Johanna reaches out and takes Annie’s cold hands in her warm ones. Other than that small gesture, she doesn’t express sympathy; rather, she shakes Annie’s hands until Annie looks at her, until green eyes meet brown.

When Johanna seems sure she has Annie’s attention, she says bluntly, “The fucker lied, Annie.”

Her heart feels as though it stops for an eternity, only to begin racing to make up those lost beats. “What?”

“Finnick was only a little closer to that tree than I was.” Johanna releases Annie’s hands and holds her own out, backs raised. Jagged red lines cover her skin, shooting up her arms to disappear under the sleeves of her government-issued gray jumpsuit, just like the one Annie wears, the ones Peeta and Enobaria and Shale wear. “I was electrocuted, too.” She spreads her arms wide in a here I am gesture, then waves toward Enobaria. “So were Bari and Peeta over there. Yeah, it hurt like hell, still does if I move wrong, but we’re not dead.”

The victor from 2 levers up from the floor and saunters toward Annie and Johanna. She claps a hand on Johanna’s shoulder and digs her fingers in hard enough to make the younger woman wince.

“Don’t call me Bari.” The smile that stretches her face doesn’t reach her dark eyes, although something does glitter there.

“Show her the lightning marks,” Johanna says with a grimace. “Bari.” She grits her teeth when Enobaria squeezes harder as she lowers herself to the floor. Grinning toothily, the smile looking genuine this time, Enobaria shoves her left sleeve up, exposing the same jagged red lines – like bolts of lightning – that Johanna bears. “There is no reason to believe Finnick is dead,” Johanna continues. “That bastard Snow is messing with your head, Annie. He told you that just to hurt you.”

Hysterical laughter bubbles up inside Annie again, along with renewed hope. She doesn’t let either of them loose as her gaze traces the thin red lines.

“As for the miscarriage...” Johanna glances at Enobaria then toward the others across the room, the Capitolites. Lowering her voice to just above a whisper, she asks, “Have you slept with anyone but Finnick in the last few months?”

“What? No!” Annie stares at her and her hands drift almost of their own volition to her abdomen. The unwanted memory of that horrible pain is almost enough to make her double over; she so wishes that she could forget.

“Then you weren’t pregnant.”

Shaking her head, feeling like Johanna’s words sucked all the oxygen from her lungs, Annie whispers, “I don’t understand.” She isn’t sure she wants to understand.

“Finnick is chemically sterile,” Enobaria tells Annie, her gaze resting on Shale when she makes her announcement, but she meets Annie’s eyes. “We all are.” Her voice is neutral, but there is a fiery anger burning in her dark eyes, the promise of violence held in check.

“All?” Annie thinks she might vomit, if she had anything in her stomach to void. Bile rises in her throat, bitter and burning, threatening to scorch her to a crisp from the inside. That awful, terrifying laughter beats at her, demanding release as Johanna nods.

“Those of us Snow uses.” Johanna curls her lip and clenches her hands into fists when she says in an exaggerated Capitol accent, “Condoms are such an inconvenience, but we wouldn’t want any accidents, now, would we?”

xXx

The broadcast cuts off, and as if through a tunnel, Finnick hears his own voice still shouting denials. Someone – Coin? – says, “Get him out of here,” and Finnick falls silent. His vocal cords feel raw. Haymitch helps him to his feet, holding him steady until a boy in a gray uniform arrives to lead him away. Haymitch starts to follow, but Coin asks him to stay, her voice clearly conveying an order, even though it’s couched as a request.

Boarding an elevator, Finnick and his escort descend deep underground. Too stunned by what had just happened on top of all that came before, Finnick stares blankly at the back of the boy’s head. The doors open on a white corridor, and they make their way down twisting passages past several rooms. In one of those rooms, Katniss lies on a narrow bed, her arena uniform exchanged for a hospital gown. Finnick barely has time to take that in before they reach another room and stop. After checking the number above the doorway, the boy soldier gestures for Finnick to precede him.

A young woman with pale skin and white-blonde hair breezes past them and shoos the boy soldier out, then pushes Finnick toward an uncomfortable-looking examination table covered in stiff white paper. Shoving a small white bundle at him, she draws a curtain around the table, cutting off his view of everything that might distract him from the images that have begun to scratch at the back of his brain. She leaves him there with a curt, “Put that on and wait for Dr. Colburn.”

Changing into the hospital gown, leaving his borrowed clothes in a heap on the floor, Finnick waits. He doesn’t want to sit on that table; it reminds him too much of the Capitol and the examinations he had to go through at the beginning of every visit. After several minutes of waiting, he slides down the wall to sit on the floor beside the pile of clothes, his bare knees tented in front of him. Leaning his head back against the wall, he shuts his eyes.

His uncle Rick is dead, captured by Capitol forces and publicly executed, so what does that mean for his parents? For Shandra and Kyle? The rest of his family? They should have all been together, whether watching the Games like good little citizens or fleeing the district, as Finnick had asked of them. Torturing himself, he replays the Capitol broadcast in his mind; once he starts, he can’t stop.

“Down with the Capitol! We’re stronger than you! We will fight you!”

Over and over Rick shouts his defiance. Over and over he drops, the snap of his neck echoing in Finnick’s brain. When the memories of his uncle’s televised death aren’t sufficient torture, his imagination supplies its own details. The creak of rope straining against wood dried by summer heat and salt air. The cries of gulls and crows squabbling over their feast. The wind moaning as it passes between and around the buildings of the town square, picking up dust and sand in swirls of dull tan and beige to coat cloth and skin and hair. The sickly sweet odor of meat beginning to turn.

The flow of images, sounds, smells stops abruptly when a woman – almost certainly Dr. Colburn – arrives, pushing past the curtain and pulling it closed once more. She has an iron gray buzz cut and wears the same gray shirt and trousers everyone else in District 13 seems to. Finnick feels like he and his friends are the only civilians in some kind of military compound.

“Well, Citizen Odair, let’s have a look at you.” Dr. Colburn removes a pair of glasses from the top of her head and slips them onto her face, pushing them up the slope of her nose with the tip of her middle finger. A jagged pink scar, contrasting sharply with the darkness of her skin, splits her left eyebrow and disappears into her hair line. Nodding her head toward the exam table, she orders, “Have a seat.”

Eyeing her warily, he stays right where he is. Dressed in nothing but his underwear and the thin white hospital gown, still reeling from the shock of his uncle’s execution, he feels more exposed now than he ever did with a client. At least then he could hide behind the mask he had created, pretending to be confident and in control. He doesn’t know what to do in this situation, how to act. The only people here he trusts aren’t in much better shape than he is, and the denizens of this place have neatly separated them, leaving them to sink or swim on their own.

“Citizen Odair.” Colburn’s voice is all sharp edges and prickly points. “Sit.” She raps her knuckles on the exam table with a rustle of paper.

“I’m not a dog,” he tells her, fighting the sudden urge to giggle. Leaning forward, he drops his knees, biting the inside of his cheek in the hope that the pain will distract him, but it only serves to intensify the surreal fog in his mind.

Blowing out a gust of air, she takes two steps toward him and reaches out a hand, probably to yank him up onto the table, but he jerks backward, hitting his head hard against the wall. Her eyes widen, and she drops her hand back to her side. “I meant no offense, Citizen Odair.”

“Why do you keep calling me that?”

She cocks her head to one side. “It’s your name, isn’t it?”

Pressing one hand to the back of his head – I probably just gave myself a concussion – Finnick snorts, holding the giggles again at bay. “No, not that. ‘Citizen.’” He leans back against the wall, dropping his hand to his lap. Still feeling far too exposed, feeling as though he’s maybe falling apart and it’s just that no one has noticed yet, he draws his knees up once more and wraps his arms around his legs. Clasping his hands around his wrists, he digs his fingers in just short of causing pain.

“You’re a victor.” She steps closer again, but this time makes no move to touch him. “You and the others started the rebellion. Leadership voted unanimously to grant you citizenship.” She smiles then, transforming her severe features into something almost welcoming. “Please, Citizen Odair,” she says, her voice softer, “from what I’ve been told, you’ve suffered a series of shocks to body and mind. Let me help you.”

“Shocks?” Finnick looks at her earnest expression, so at odds with her gruff orders only moments before, drops his gaze to her outstretched hand, and loses the battle. Giggles turn to guffaws until tears stream from his eyes. “Shocks.” The arena. The lightning. Electrocution. District 13. Annie in Snow’s blood-stained hands. His uncle’s murder. The laughter rips from his throat like broken glass and he can’t stop, can’t breathe. He grips the sides of his head, grinding the heels of his hands into his temples, desperate to stem the tide of hysteria before he drowns in it.

Cool hands cover his, implacable as they force him to look into a pair of light brown eyes behind metal-rimmed glasses. “Citizen Odair, you’re safe now.” That sets him off into more peals of hysterical laughter.

Colburn backs away from him and calls out a name he doesn’t catch. A moment later, the pale blonde woman hurries into the room and stops to stare at Finnick. He curls into himself, hoping if he can no longer see their horrified expressions, he might be able to get control of himself again.

“Tasha, get Dr. Aurelius.”

“Yes, Dr. Colburn.” Tasha backs quickly out of the room again, her footsteps echoing down the corridor as she runs.

Finnick hears rattling as Colburn searches for something; a moment later, she jabs a needle into his arm. Sounds begin almost immediately to echo and his vision fades, losing focus and color as he drifts away.

When he wakes, he’s lying flat on his back, his bed surrounded by a light gray curtain cutting him off from the rest of the room. The lights on the ceiling are blinding, and he tries to block the light with his left arm only to discover his wrists strapped to the bed. There’s a large thing – metal and plastic – covering him from stomach to mid-thigh, setting his nerve endings to tingling. Panic begins to rise, and he fights the urge to tear himself free of whatever it is, his muscles twitching with the need to escape, escape, escape.

On the other side of the curtain, he overhears a man’s voice. “And he was the only one? Not the others?”

“Yes, Connie,” Dr. Colburn replies. “I’ll give him something that should reverse the effects. Other than that, he’s in fairly good shape, physically, given what he’s been through in such a short time. I’ll want to keep him under observation for a couple of days, but after that, he’s all yours.”

The conversation seems to be at an end as Finnick hears footsteps walking rapidly away. A moment later the curtain opens, and Dr. Colburn steps through.

“You’re awake,” she says, walking over to the machine. Her glasses reflect a lighted readout as she looks down her nose at it. Apparently satisfied with whatever she sees there, she toggles a switch. The tingling abruptly stops along with a faint buzz he hadn’t noticed until it was gone. She hits another switch and the device rises, retracting along a track between the lights into a niche in the ceiling.

He jumps at a sudden sensation of cold on his left arm, trying to jerk his arm away with no more success than before. “Relax, Citizen Odair.” Colburn swipes at his arm again before pushing a needle into the center of the site she’d just cleaned.

“What is that?” He tries to keep his voice steady, but he can’t judge whether or not he succeeds – he’s had far too many drugs injected into his system over the years, most of them without his consent, to be capable of relaxing about it now. It’s not even the first time Dr. Colburn has shot him up with something, and she didn’t ask then, either.

She pulls the spent needle from his arm and places a cotton ball on the injection site. “It’s just a vitamin cocktail. Nothing for you to worry about.” She tosses the needle into a small receptacle labeled Caution – Biohazard. “It’ll speed your recovery from the dehydration.” She makes a notation on a clipboard at the end of his bed and then pulls a sheet up to cover him. “Try to get some sleep, Citizen Odair. You’ll feel better in the morning.” Her words and tone sound comforting, but she won’t meet his eyes.

Chapter Text

Chapter 4 – The Tip of the Needle

Johanna is the first.

A Peacekeeper in full armor opens the cell door and three more enter, going straight for her. Two of them have their guns at the ready. The third has a metal cylinder in his or her hand, a pair of prongs with electricity sparking between them pointed toward the center of Johanna’s chest.

Johhanna slowly rises from the floor. Annie can’t read the expression in her eyes or in the lines of her face, but as soon as she’s upright she spits, the gobbet of saliva hitting the Peacekeeper’s visor dead center. Without a word, the Peacekeeper touches the arcing prongs to Johanna’s chest. Her entire body goes rigid, a grunt of pain escaping her lips. Peeta and Atala move toward them, but the other Peacekeepers lift their guns and take aim, not at them, but at Effie Trinket and Enobaria. Effie gasps, looking terrified, but Enobaria waves a hand dismissively at the guard. She doesn’t pause in her conversation with Shale.

Unable to catch herself due to still-spasming muscles, Johanna falls heavily to the floor when the guard releases her from the electricity. Crouching beside her, the Peacekeeper snaps metal cuffs around her wrists and then drags her, twitching, through the door. When that door clangs shut, silence reigns.

Annie’s gaze darts from Enobaria to Shale, Silke to Effie, Peeta to Atala to the white metal armor and blank black visors of the guards on the other side of the bars. She shudders. Tears fill her eyes as she stares at that door. She still hears the slither-scrape as the Peacekeeper dragged Johanna like a ragdoll down the hallway to who knows where. She covers her ears to block it out, but that only makes it worse. The sound of a body dragged across concrete morphs into the sound of her own blood rushing through her veins morphs into the sound of water rushing through a broken dam. Locking her knees to her chest with her arms, Annie squeezes her eyes shut and begins to hum. A moment later, her siren – no, Atala, the siren’s name is Atala – slides down the wall to the floor beside her, humming a descant to Annie’s broken melody.

xXx

Fingers dig into his arms, hands hold him down, stroke him, throttle him, caress him. Vines move like snakes to encircle his ankles, his wrists, squeezing tighter and tighter until he feels his bones scrape together. Finnick twists and turns but can’t escape; his arms and legs immobilized, he can’t get away. Slamming his head backward into a yielding surface, feeling as though he’s suffocating, he tries to break free of the hands and vines holding him prisoner.

He wakes screaming. Another set of screams joins his a beat later, shrieks that rival his in volume and terror. Jerking his arms with all his strength, Finnick still can’t escape the restraints that tie him down. A sudden burst of light overhead has him blinking rapidly, just one more thing to try to escape. He doesn’t know where he is, only that he woke from one nightmare into another.

“Citizen Odair! Citizen Everdeen!”

The familiar voice – Dr. Colburn; this is District 13 – breaks through the walls of Finnick’s nightmare. He chokes on his own voice, strangles the new shout trying to rip from his throat, but he can’t stop frantically trying to jerk free of the straps that still hold him down. Flailing his head wildly, he sees Katniss a few feet away, also strapped to a hospital bed, her back arched as she screams.

Cool hands press him into the stiff mattress, but he doesn’t stop trying to break the grip of the – hands, vines – restraints.

“Relax, Citizen Odair. You’re safe.” He’s heard it before. The sheer wrongness of the words you’re safe make him laugh, the sound a little sharp, a little ragged to match his harsh breathing. Every muscle hurts from fighting. In his distraction, he almost misses the sting of the needle, but he can feel the cold liquid entering his vein.

“No. No!” He yanks his arm away too late and to no more effect than before. The restraints remain locked tight. “No more drugs!” A few feet away, he hears Katniss, her voice too low to make out what she says. He turns back to Colburn even as cotton begins to fill his brain. “Let me go,” he begs, tugging once more at the straps. He doesn’t want the nightmare of mutt vines and grasping hands to return. No drug has ever been enough to keep them at bay, no matter how hard he tried.

“Hush. It’s for your own good, Citizen Odair. And ours. You nearly broke my assistant’s arm the last...”

The cotton grows too thick, swallowing him whole. Darkness descends.

xXx

After Johanna, they come for Atala, who walks out the door with her gaze fixed on some point far down the corridor, her head held high. Neither she nor the Peacekeepers say a word. The only sound is Effie’s choked-off sob until Annie, still huddled on the floor, lifts her head and begins to sing a wordless song, the same one she had sung with Atala. If her song is a little shaky, no one asks her to stop.

Later still, they take Peeta. He asks where they’ve taken the others, but the Peacekeepers don’t answer as they lead him away, hands tightly cuffed behind his back. His gait is uneven, a product of fatigue and his prosthetic leg.

For a long time after Peeta’s voice fades away, no one says anything until Shale breaks the silence. “I wonder who’ll be next.”

Annie tunes out the speculation that follows, humming aimless notes or singing simple children’s songs from District 4 until her voice becomes rough with it. The arrival of food and water eventually breaks the flow, both of her humming and the speculation. She could refuse the food – a few bites of meat, a slice of bread, a green vegetable of some sort – but forces herself to eat anyway, knowing that she’ll need all her strength to get through whatever awaits. Once the Peacekeepers are gone, the others discuss the possible reasons for feeding them as well as they are.

Sitting alone, Annie resists all attempts by the others to draw her into the conversation, turning her back to them and leaning her head and shoulders against the wall. It’s only when the lights dim and she allows herself to drift toward sleep that she realizes Silke had neither speculated about their fate nor engaged in the discussion of food. For Annie’s part, she hadn’t wanted to give those who listen any more information to use against her than they already have; she wonders if Silke remained silent for the same reasons.

Still in that twilight space between waking and sleep, Annie becomes aware that someone has moved closer to her. She feels his warmth in contrast to the cold, hard floor, smells the slightly acrid scent of stale sweat.

“I know none of this is truly my fault,” Rafe whispers, low enough that she’s sure he’s talking to himself, not her. “But I feel like it is.” He shifts, making himself more comfortable. “I’m so sorry. I never knew things could be like this.”

“Too little, too late,” Annie whispers. He jerks beside her, subsides as she shifts until she’s sitting with her back to the wall.

He huffs an airy sound that might be a laugh. “You must want me to just die.”

Rafe’s feelings of guilt are meaningless to Annie. She doesn’t know what to say to him. Forgiveness, regardless of what he did or didn’t know, isn’t in her, but his compliance with the Games, his tacit approval of their existence and purpose won’t save him now. Turning toward him, she sees the sheen of tears on his cheeks, a faint glimmer in the darkness of the cell. Without thinking about it, she reaches up to wipe them away.

“I don’t want you to die, Rafe,” she tells him. “I want you to live. Too many have died already.” She shivers, thinking of the Peacekeepers, the tributes in the arena who died at her hands. Fingertips sliding against each other, lubricated by slippery tears, she lifts those hands in front of her, looks at the dark silhouette of slender fingers, roughened by salt air and salt-laden nets but still delicate enough to work shells and cords into jewelry. A killer’s hands.

She doesn’t trust Rafe, doesn’t particularly like him, but with him there, she feels oddly safer. Lowering her hands to her lap, she rests her head on the wall and closes her eyes.

She wakes with a start, disoriented and with no idea how long she slept. Rough hands drag her up from the floor. Rafe shouts her name as a Peacekeeper snaps metal cuffs onto her wrists. Annie doesn’t fight it as two Peacekeepers lead her from the cell. She feels Silke watching her even as the lights on the cell block go out once more.

xXx

Sitting in an uncomfortable office chair, Finnick picks at a thread that’s come loose along the inner seam of his regulation gray trousers. They match perfectly the regulation gray shirt. He almost laughs; it’s the first time since he got off that hovercraft that he’s worn anything more than an airy hospital gown. The room in which he sits is no more than a ten by ten cube; a desk and file cabinet take up most of the space. If he were claustrophobic, he’d probably have picked apart the seams of his trousers completely by now. He’d give almost anything for a length of rope or string. Maybe if he manages to pull the thread completely free, it will be long enough for him to work some knots. It’s not really a useful thing to do, but at least it would be something to keep his hands—

“This interview is merely a diagnostic, Citizen Odair,” Dr. Constantine Aurelius says in an oh-so-soothing tone. “You seem anxious. What is it that you’re worried about?”

Finnick stares at the doctor. This time, he actively tries not to laugh, because he’s not sure he’ll be able to stop once he starts. What isn’t he worried about? He has no idea what’s going on in the outside world. The last he heard of any of his family was his uncle’s execution on live television, which he relives every night in his dreams. When he asks for word of Annie or his family or even his fellow victors, no one will tell him anything when it’s obvious there is something to tell. He knows where Katniss is and how she’s doing – they still share a hospital room, and they wake each other from nightmares on a regular basis – but he hasn’t heard from or of either Haymitch or Beetee in the three days he’s been here. He thinks it’s three; they keep drugging him, so it’s hard to be sure.

He stops picking at the seam, sits up straight in his chair, and looks Aurelius in the eye. “I’m worried about my family and my girlfriend,” he begins, wincing internally at downplaying his and Annie’s relationship, but it’s been a habit for so long. No one in 13 has given him any reason to break that habit. If he tells Aurelius what he’s truly thinking and feeling – they’re hurting her, torturing her, forcing a breakdown she might not be able to come back from – rather than what the man wants to hear, they’ll never stop drugging him. That makes him have to fight off laughter again. There was once a time he had drugged himself, just to get through the day, the week, the month without having to think or feel anything. His fingers start to itch. Rather than picking at the seam again, he flattens his palms on his knees, trying hard to hold himself still while Aurelius studies him.

“Your girlfriend,” the doctor repeats, jotting something down. “That’s Annie Cresta, isn’t it?”

As if she was an object rather than a person. Typical Capitolite. “Yes, she’s Annie.”

“What do you think is happening to her that makes you worry?” His tone is utterly neutral, but Finnick thinks he must know that Annie is a prisoner of the Capitol, of Snow. They must have briefed the man regarding the victors in their midst. He might not – surely doesn’t – know everything about Finnick, but he must at least understand that anyone he cares about who’s in Capitol hands is in danger.

Keeping his tone as neutral as he can, he says, “She’s a prisoner of the Capitol. I’m a known rebel. If nothing else, they’re interrogating her for information she doesn’t have.” He closes his eyes for a moment against a sudden vision of her surrounded by Peacekeepers, one of them injecting something into her arm as she struggles to break free. When he opens them again, he sees Aurelius scribbling rapidly. Finnick balls his hands into fists, the rougher skin of his palms catching at the fabric of his trousers, fabric that should be smooth. Finnick looks down at knuckles white from the pressure of bone straining against skin and forces his hands to open, revealing a tear at the seam he had picked at earlier.

“Do you have violent urges, Citizen Odair?”

“What?” Finnick drags his gaze away from the damaged trousers to look at Aurelius.

“Dr. Colburn mentioned that you broke her assistant’s arm when he tried to wake you for your medication two days ago.”

Finnick blinks, trying to remember the incident. Colburn had mentioned it, too, but all he recalls is an older man holding him down, telling him to be a good boy and take his medicine. He isn’t even sure the man actually said that. He doesn’t remember the nightmare, either, but given what little he can recall, it was no doubt about some client or series of clients, not the arena. Regardless, it’s dangerous to wake a victor in the midst of a nightmare, no matter what the cause.

“Do you dislike being touched? What is it that you’re afraid of?”

Finnick feels himself slipping. He opens his mouth to answer, but the only sound that comes out is something closer to what an animal might make than a human being. Aurelius continues to ask questions. Does he want to hurt other people? Does he want to hurt himself? Does he think his nightmares are caused by his recent visit to the arena?

Losing the fight to stay calm, Finnick surges to his feet, startling Aurelius and sending him backward from the desk. His flight stops abruptly when his chair hits the wall. Pressing his hands over his ears, just like Annie, Finnick hears himself begging for Aurelius to stop talking. Aurelius shouts for someone and the next thing Finnick feels is the sting of a needle before he slips down the wall to the floor and into darkness.

xXx

The Peacekeepers take Annie to a room as high above ground as her cell is below, judging by the length of time it takes the elevator to climb. They leave her there to wait, surrounded by mahogany and leather. Frightened. Alone. The door snicks shut with finality, and she shivers. She’s been here before. President Snow’s office. She wonders if he’s going to make her wait for hours as he did before, but even as she has the thought, the door opens once more. Still standing where her guards left her, Annie bites back a giggle.

“My dear Miss Cresta,” Snow begins, filling the doorway, smiling cheerfully as though she were a treasured guest rather than a prisoner. He’s dressed in a white suit with a white rose in his left lapel. His mane of white hair just brushes his collar. His skin has the matte finish of nearly white powder. The only color is the blue of his eyes and a tiny spot of red at the corner of his mouth. When she doesn’t respond, he pushes the rest of the way into the room, the scent of roses trailing behind as he walks to his desk. “Please, sit. We have quite a bit to talk about.”

Staring at him, the image pops into her head of the two of them sitting together over tea to gossip about the latest fashions. All but choking in her attempts to hold a fit of the giggles at bay, she loses the fight. Snow raises one white eyebrow, which only makes her laugh harder.

“I’m glad you find this all so amusing, Miss Cresta.” He leans forward, resting his elbows on the desk. Steepling his fingertips together, he says, “I wonder if the families of the men you killed three days ago would agree.”

Annie closes her eyes, willing the memories of all the blood and death in the victors’ lounge to stay away. Her laughter stops – mostly – but she can still feel it bubbling beneath the surface, ready to break free if she’s careless.

“When I told you to sit, it wasn’t a request. I don’t want you looming over me as we chat.” She laughs again, although she tries not to, but she doesn’t sit. She knows very well that defiance won’t do her any good, but it’s the only control she has over herself or her life just then. Exercising that defiance, she remains standing. Snow sighs but makes no further issue of it.

He waits until her laughter subsides again before he says, “Tell me what you know of the rebellion.”

Blinking in surprise, Annie tells him truthfully, “I know nothing, President Snow.”

“Really. I find that hard to believe, given your relationship with the lovely and rebellious Mr. Odair.” He leans back in his chair, studying her. “Alright, Annie – such a sweet name, that. Annie.” He lingers on her name, his gaze traveling over her body, making her feel naked and cold. “I’m not at all satisfied that you know nothing. But as I haven’t yet decided what to do with you, I suppose I’ll have to return you to your cell.”

Pressing a button on his telephone, the door opens almost immediately. Annie sees the bright green suit of Snow’s personal assistant out of the corner of her eye as he stops in the doorway. “Have the Peacekeepers take Miss Cresta to her cell.” The man steps back to allow her pair of guards to enter. “If I were you, Annie, my dear,” Snow says, “I would think long and hard about what you might or might not know about the treason of yourself and your friends. If you give me what I want, I can be very generous.”

Remembering all the nights Finnick woke screaming in her arms, all the times he returned from the Capitol unwilling to be anywhere near her because he was too close to what had been done to him and might hurt her – physically hurt her – without meaning to, Annie laughs yet again. The sound is harsh and brittle, very different from what came before.

“I know all about your generosity." She pauses, one last small act of defiance before adding, "Mr. Snow.”

xXx

Finnick wakes with a headache. His dry as dust mouth tastes metallic. There’s a set of clean clothes – gray, of course – stacked at the end of his bed. In a vain attempt to rub out some of the fuzz that seems to wrap his brain, he scrubs his hands over his face. There is stubble on his chin and jaw, something he isn’t used to; the injections they gave him at the beginning of each Capitol visit to suppress hair growth usually lasted long enough that he didn’t have to shave between visits.

“Since you’re awake, you should probably get dressed.” Finnick looks over to where Katniss sits cross-legged in the center of her narrow bed. “We’re scheduled for a facility tour this morning.” Her voice is rough.

As if on cue, Dr. Aurelius enters, flipping through pages of notes on a clipboard. “Good morning, Citizens.” He scrawls something across the top page and hangs the clipboard on a hook on the wall between their beds. A man with brown hair and sallow skin follows him in and leans back against the wall behind the doctor, one foot planted flat against it, his knee tented in front of him. “Citizen Dalton here is going to orient you to the district this morning so you can begin to integrate with the population.” The man gives them both a little wave. Aurelius glances from Katniss to Finnick before he turns to leave. “Get dressed, Citizen Odair. Breakfast is in fifteen minutes.”

The prospect of real food, of a morning without drugs pumped into his system, distracts Finnick from the fact that he has an audience. He’s standing there naked, stepping into a pair of underwear when it occurs to him that Katniss might be embarrassed. A quick glance shows him somewhere along the line Katniss turned her back to him. He grins, thinking back to the elevator ride after the tribute parade when Johanna and he had poked at the girl’s innocence. He sobers quickly, though. Jo is in Snow’s hands, tortured for rebel secrets. Katniss’ innocence is gone, if it was ever there to begin with. Sometimes it's hard to remember that she's only seventeen.

When Finnick is wearing District 13 gray shirt and trousers, his no different from Katniss’ or Dalton’s, he goes to stand beside her. “Sorry about that, Katniss.”

She looks at him for a moment. Shrugging, she says, “I guess it’s nothing I haven’t seen before.”

It takes him a second before he realizes she’s remembering the day they met, too. “Oh, please. That net didn’t show everything.” It’s reassuring to know that he isn’t alone here, after all, that he still has at least one ally in this new arena.

Dalton leads them from their shared room, stopping at a console in the hallway outside. He taps something into the console where a light flashes green. Stepping back, the sallow man gestures toward Katniss. “Ladies first.” Finnick feels Katniss tense beside him, the instinct of fight or flight coming into play. They both stare at the man, neither of them going nearer to the device than they already are. Looking from one to the other of the victors, Dalton smacks himself on the forehead and grins. “Sorry. It’s your schedule. Put your arm in here” – he points at an arm-sized hole – “and it prints out your schedule.”

The man’s accent and manner tell Finnick he’s not a native of 13. If he’s not actually from District 10 originally, he’s from somewhere on the border with 9. Dalton pushes up his sleeve to show them an agenda printed in blue ink on his right arm. “Don’t worry. It’ll wash off at the end of the day.” Before pulling his sleeve back down to cover it, Finnick reads a couple of lines from Dalton’s arm. 07:45 – Hospital wing, room 227. 08:00 – Cafeteria 2, breakfast. 08:30 – Orientation w/C. Everdeen & C. Odair.

Finnick glances at Katniss, who stares at the blinking green light, her arms wrapped around her torso. For a heartbeat, she reminds him of Annie. “Everyone has these?” he asks, clenching his hands into fists. Katniss doesn’t need him to protect her here anymore than Annie ever did back home.

“Yep. Everyone over the age of five. Even President Coin.”

Katniss looks up at Finnick then, a question in her gray eyes. He takes a deep breath before starting to roll up his sleeve. She nods and unbuttons her cuff, unceremoniously shoving her own sleeve up before thrusting her arm into the scheduler. A couple of seconds later she pulls her arm out, rubbing a finger over the blue lettering as Dalton taps again at the console.

“Your turn,” he tells Finnick, who shrugs and puts his arm in. It’s not the worst thing that’s ever been done to his skin.

There’s a cool, tingling sensation on the inside of his forearm, quickly gone. Unconsciously imitating Katniss, he rubs lightly at the ink, completely indelible until it isn't. He’d had temporary tattoos like this before, though they’d been a lot flashier and more colorful, not to mention less functional. Usually, his clients had opted for body paint, but there had been a few who hadn’t wanted the color or designs to fade with exertion, which sometimes happened with the paint.

Katniss holds her right arm up against Finnick’s. Their schedules are identical until 11:00 – Physical Therapy for her, 11:00 – Command for him. They share a puzzled look. If anything, shouldn’t she be the one going to Command?

“There must be some mistake,” Finnick says and looks at Katniss. “I’m not the Mockingjay.”

Crossing her arms beneath her breasts, she says, “Neither am I.” He has the sense that some things have happened since they arrived that he was too out of it to know anything about.

“Nope. They don’t make mistakes here in Thirteen.” Katniss narrows her eyes at Dalton.

“You’re not serious.”

“Nope.” Dalton grins at her. “Not a serious bone in my body.” He looks at the schedule printed on Finnick’s arm. “But maybe I should’ve said they don’t admit to mistakes here. C’mon,” he continues, sobering. “Chow waits for no one. Don’t know about y’all, but I’m hungry.”

Chapter Text

Chapter 5 - A String Come Undone

Day and night, light and dark bleed into one another, merge and mingle, rendered meaningless by the whims of their Peacekeeper guards. For hours at a time they plunge the cell block into darkness as impenetrable and oppressive as octopus ink, only to flood it with light so intense it’s a weight pressing on Annie’s skin. They change the temperatures to suffocatingly hot or bone-chillingly cold and set off screaming klaxons at random to make sleep impossible, anything to keep their prisoners off balance and vulnerable.

At first, Annie tries to keep track of time by scraping marks in the concrete floor with a stolen spoon, but the confusing schedule makes that completely unreliable, so she gives it up. When they find the spoon and take it away from her two days – or at least two of the longer light cycles – later, she laughs until her throat hurts.

After several cycles with nothing to drink, their guards finally provide water, as much as the prisoners want, but Annie doesn’t need to taste it to know that it’s saltwater, little better than poison. Finnick’s ex-stylist is foolish enough or desperate enough to drink it; the Peacekeepers leave Rafe on the floor of his cell, moaning in pain. There’s nothing Annie or any of the others can do for him, and she’s not entirely sure she wants to help him. When the moans stop, they take him away, unconscious or dead, she doesn’t know.

Not long after the saltwater, Peacekeepers take Enobaria away, her hands locked behind her back. In spite of the shackles, she leaves with the guards under her own power, her back straight and her head held high. When they return, she can barely stand. If they’re willing to treat Enobaria like that, Annie thinks, what will they do to the rest of us? The Peacekeepers drag the victor from 2 back into her cell and slam the door shut. The metallic clang seems to echo forever, the sound neither stopping nor fading, and that frightens Annie worse than almost anything else so far.

Listening to Enobaria’s harsh breathing, to that ghostly echo, Annie can feel herself slipping into the darkness that’s lived inside her since the arena. Closing her eyes so tightly she sees jagged streaks of lighting, she hums, wrapping the notes around the echoes in her brain until the soft, atonal music suffocates them.

Eventually, she sleeps, waking to a sudden burst of light overhead and a red-haired young man in the cell directly across from hers. He wasn’t there when she fell asleep. Sitting up on the bench that serves as her bed, she giggles at the notion he somehow magically appeared in that burst of light. Sitting on the floor of the cell, his back against the wall and his legs stretched out in front, the man stares toward Annie but doesn’t react to her sudden laughter.

“I hate morning people.” Johanna’s voice floats up the corridor from a few cells away, a jab at Annie. The new prisoner doesn’t react to that, either. Sobering, Annie moves to the bars, pressing her face between them.

“Who are you?” She keeps her voice pitched soft and low. The guards haven’t discouraged them from talking to one another, although she’s sure that will come with time, but she sees no reason to draw their attention now. The man doesn’t answer, just slowly blinks twice before finally focusing blue eyes on her. Drawing his knees up to his chest, he wraps his arms around them and shakes his head as if to say no. It occurs to her he might not be a prisoner at all, might be a spy sent to trick one of them into revealing the rebel secrets they supposedly hold.

“Darius? Is that you?” Peeta asks from the cell to Annie’s right. The red-haired man jerks and his eyes widen. He looks toward Peeta’s cell, anguish as clear on his face as the freckles, but then he turns back toward Annie, his expression impassive. No further attempts at communication elicit any response at all, regardless of their source.

Moving to the far side of her cell, closer to Peeta’s, Annie asks, “Do you know him?” She doesn’t stop watching Darius.

There’s a pause before Peeta answers. “He was a Peacekeeper assigned to District Twelve, one of Katniss’ friends, I think. He disappeared when the new head Peacekeeper arrived.” He pauses again, both sympathy and pity plain in his voice along with a more subtle thread of anger. “They made him an Avox and assigned him to serve Katniss and me in the Training Center.”

Enobaria hisses. A quiet “fuck” comes from Johanna’s direction. Annie swallows, her hands drifting to her mouth as she wonders what it must be like to find nothing but emptiness there.

xXx

No longer being confined to the hospital level and simply walking through the public halls of District 13 with Katniss and Dalton is a huge change for Finnick. The white-painted walls and the gray concrete floors are no more interesting to look at than those in his hospital room, but the people they pass are another story. Dressed in more or less identical gray blouse and trousers, the people are as different in appearance from one another as they could possibly be.

Finnick had visited other districts, but there had been a certain homogeneity to each district’s population – dark skin, hair, and eyes in 11; lighter but still brown skin and eyes in 3 and 8, although their hair had been black or blond, red or brown or any shade in between; pale skin and lighter shades of hair and eyes in 1 and 5 – but 13 encompasses them all.

“The people here seem to come from all over Panem,” Katniss observes, an echo of Finnick’s thoughts.

“Yep,” Dalton says, not slowing. “A lot of us here are refugees. Most show up in dribs and drabs.” When Katniss frowns, he clarifies without missing a beat. “One from here, two or three from there, but then you get a big influx like ya’ll from Twelve.” He grins at Katniss and then glances at Finnick. “We’re even starting to see a few from as far away as Four and Seven.”

“We just passed someone who sounded a lot like home,” Finnick responds as Dalton pushes through a set of double doors. Finnick’s stomach growls at the sudden smell of food, making Dalton laugh.

“The food here ain’t anything to write home about, but it’ll fill you up and keep you healthy for all that.” He snorts. “’Course, happy’s another story.”

Finnick’s gaze lands on a trio setting down trays on the end of a table below a wall-mounted television, one of half a dozen screens around the room. Two of the three have their backs to Finnick; they’d look like something out of an arena nightmare if he wasn’t familiar with the insect-like carapace that covers the equipment of a Capitol film crew. The third is a blonde woman with half her head shaved and green vines inked onto her pale skin.

Grinning, he starts toward them. First Katniss and then Dalton call his name, and Finnick takes a couple of steps back in their direction. “I want to say hi to an old friend.” He laughs a little at the surprise in Katniss’ expression before he turns around and shouts, “Cressida!”

The blonde woman looks up in startled recognition. The men with her turn to see what’s going on as Cressida smiles and opens her arms wide. She and Finnick hug in the middle of a District 13 cafeteria while first Castor and then Pollux set their equipment packs on the floor before they take her place. Pollux slaps Finnick on the back as they embrace.

“What are you doing here?” Finnick asks, not quite believing his own senses.

“At the moment,” Cressida answers for them all, “marveling at the fact you’re still alive. Official reports from the Capitol say you didn’t survive the fall of the arena.”

Finnick snorts. “It’s not the first time the Capitol lied about something.” Cressida and Castor laugh, not noticing that Finnick doesn’t laugh with them as an image flashes in his head of his uncle Rick, dangling at the end of a rope. He had thought Rick’s execution was a message to him in 13, and what Cressida says does nothing to dispel that idea. Snow doesn’t want the general populace to know any of the victors survived the explosion and remain outside his grasp, but he knows, and he wants them to know that he can still hurt them. Another image replaces Rick – Annie with Snow, straight from Finnick’s nightmares. Pollux slaps Finnick on the back again, pulling him back to the present. Grinning, the man turns toward his brother, fingers flashing.

Finnick had first met Cressida eight years ago when she documented his visit to the Capitol the year he’d turned sixteen. Neither Castor nor Pollux had been part of her team then; he’d met them later, separately, as members of other interview crews. He’d worked with each of the three several times over the years during photo shoots and television specials. Then one year Pollux disappeared, victim of his own too-pointed video opinion piece directed at Egeria Lockhart, Snow’s Minister of Affairs. Finnick had thought him dead, executed for treason, but around the time of the 74th Games, he’d learned Pollux lived, although without a tongue, symbolically silenced.

It’s a pleasant surprise to see them here. Cressida in particular had always been sympathetic toward Finnick. As good a journalist as she is, he’s sure she has an inkling of what his life as a victor became. She’d been there, unobtrusive, almost part of the scenery the first time Snow had sold him. She couldn’t know the details of what had happened, but she’d noticed the change in him, had remarked on it during an interview later in that visit. She’d dropped that line of inquiry when she saw just how uncomfortable her questions made him, and for that he’d been grateful.

With a quick glance over his shoulder toward Katniss and the food line, Finnick reminds Cressida, “You still haven’t told me why you’re here.”

“Your friend Katniss, of course.” Cressida sits, pulling Finnick down next to her on the bench. “Not many were allowed to notice when she launched that arrow into the heart of the arena, but we three,” she gestures toward the brothers, “were privileged to see it.” She takes a bite of bread and washes it down with a healthy swallow of water. Finnick’s stomach rumbles. “It was a game changer, so to speak.” She grins, a lop-sided thing that says she knows all sorts of things she shouldn’t. “Plutarch Heavensbee has us documenting the revolution, or at least his version of it.”

“Revolution?”

“You haven’t heard? Most of the districts are in full-scale revolt. There are uprisings everywhere. No doubt Heavensbee will have you in the thick of it, if only to prove to the rest of Panem that you and his Mockingjay are alive and well.”

Someone comes up behind Finnick. Tensing, he fights the urge to stand and either put as much distance as he can between himself and whoever it is or put his fist in their stomach. Neither Cressida nor her crew shows any signs of alarm, though, and he tries to relax.

“Citizen Odair, you have about ten minutes to eat before we’re off to your next appointment.” Finnick looks up at Dalton, who points toward a table about ten feet away where Katniss sits with a young man who looks enough like her he could be her brother.

“I’ll be there in a minute, Dalton. Thanks.” He can’t quite bring himself to call him Citizen, not with a straight face.

“Go on, Finnick,” Cressida tells him as they watch Dalton saunter back over to Katniss. “I have a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot of each other for a while, what with Heavensbee’s propos.”

Pollux and Castor are deep in conversation, fingers moving so fast they’re almost a blur. Finnick stands. Cressida follows suit, pulling him into another hug.

“I’m really glad to see a friendly face here, Cressida,” he tells her.

She hugs him tighter and then lets him go, but when he turns to walk away, she stops him with a light touch to his shoulder. “For what it’s worth, Finnick, I’m sorry for the part I played in how Snow presented you to the rest of Panem. You were never that man. I hope I can rectify at least a part of the perception.”

“We all had our parts to play, Cressida. None of us are innocents.” He glances at Pollux, but both he and Castor, conversation paused, nod their agreement.

Joining Dalton and Katniss with barely enough time to wolf down his food, Finnick hopes his stomach will remain quiet during his upcoming meeting with Alma Coin. He had only met her the one time, but something about her puts him on edge.

xXx

The wall against Annie’s shoulders and the floor beneath her bare feet are warm. She stares unseeing toward the guard station. For once the temperature in the block is comfortable, setting her to floating in a twilight space between waking and sleep, a prisoner in her cell and yet not. Fueled by the warmth, her imagination supplies the illusion of comfort and runs with it. Half dreaming, she can almost hear the surf breaking on the beach, can practically feel the sun at her back and the sand between her toes.

“On your feet!” A jolt of electricity centered just beneath her jaw accompanies the shout. Annie jumps, crying out with the surprise of it. There isn’t any pain, not yet, just a tingling where the Peacekeeper’s prod touched her neck; it doesn’t go away.

Blinking, the world shifts back into focus. Annie pushes up from where she lies but not quickly enough for the guard. He grabs her by the arm, gloved fingers digging into her biceps as he drags her stumbling to her feet. Across the corridor, Darius tightly grips the bars of his cell, pressing his body against the metal, straining toward Annie. The guard pushes her roughly through the door and into the corridor. She comes up hard against those bars, her face inches from Darius’. His eyes are open so wide she can see the entire circle of his irises, the flecks of green mixed into the blue. He reaches through as though to keep the guard from taking her, and when the guard jerks her away once more, Darius opens his mouth to shout, but only an angry grunting sound escapes. Annie can’t look away from the emptiness behind his teeth.

Behind her more guards shout orders – “Keep back!” “Silence!” “Move!” – as metal clangs against metal, doors screeching open then slamming closed. Her guard twists Annie’s arms behind her back and claps metal cuffs around her wrists. With another hard shove to her right shoulder she stumbles, catches herself, the slap of her bare foot on the concrete floor somehow cutting through the rest of the noise. It’s so unexpected that she laughs.

“Stop that noise!” a female guard orders, but that just makes Annie laugh harder. Tears spring to her eyes. The woman presses Annie face first against the wall and holds her there, her touch not nearly as rough as that of the man who had pulled her from her cell. Shuffling footsteps replace the shouting behind her.

The guard releases Annie and turns her around to face Johanna and Peeta, also in shackles. The Peacekeepers take them to an elevator and up half a dozen levels before leading them along a winding hallway and through a heavy door. The floor beneath Annie’s feet changes from cool concrete to cold marble to soft carpet, the walls from featureless concrete to painted surfaces, wood accents, elegantly patterned wallpaper. No one speaks, not even Johanna, who likes to poke at her tormenters every chance she gets.

They pass through a set of double doors into a room that looks to Annie like the ballroom in the president’s mansion where the victors had all gathered before the tribute interviews. The far end is set for a photoshoot with lights and cameras, a white cloth backdrop and flooring. Half a dozen Avoxes work under the direction of a man in purple with matching hair to set up a white throne in the center of the space.

Not pausing, the group crosses the tiled floor to a smaller door and into a brightly lit room filled with racks upon racks of clothes in all the colors of the rainbow. Half a dozen men and women are already there, apparently waiting for the group to arrive. Once inside, they divide into pairs and lead Annie and the others to remake chairs while the guards take up stations by the room’s only door.

The two women who take charge of Annie’s remake set to work, talking to each other as though Annie isn’t there, or rather as though she’s a mannequin, not a living, breathing woman.

“We’ll take her down to beauty base zero,” the shorter of the two says, pulling Annie’s hair away from her shoulders. “Oh, I can do wonders with this hair!” The other woman, covered in tawny fur like a cat’s, says nothing as she unfastens Annie’s prisoner jumpsuit.

“Hey!” Johanna shouts in alarm. “What the hell are you doing?” A buzzing sound cuts through the conversations of the prep teams.

“Hold her,” a man orders and Annie looks over to see a tall, thin man with pink skin and a shock of orange hair lock Johanna’s arms behind the back of her chair with one large hand, his arm around her throat so tightly her face turns a frightening shade of red. The man who spoke presses the device in his hand to Johanna’s skull and her red-streaked dark hair falls in a shower to the floor, pooling at the base of the chair. Barely able to breathe, still she makes a wordless sound of rage. Annie’s and Peeta’s prep teams resume their work and their conversations as though it’s nothing of note.

An hour or so later, Annie wears a white silk dress that hugs the contours of her body. Her hair cascades in a riot of dark curls over her shoulders and down her bare back. The skirt of the low-cut dress drapes in two pieces from her waist, held together over her hips with delicate silver chains. A white silk collar circles her throat while matching white cuffs adorn her wrists. Her high-heeled shoes are silver. When the Peacekeepers lead her from the dressing room to the corner of the ballroom, she sees Peeta and Johanna already there. Both wear pure white and Johanna a blonde wig.

President Coriolanus Snow sits between them on the white throne. His suit is white. The rose in his lapel is white. His hair is white. His teeth are white. The only spots of color are the blue of his eyes and the blood red of his lips. Annie has never seen anything more terrifying than the jovial smile he gives her as she enters.

“Ah, my last victor is finally here. Welcome.” Rising, he takes a few steps toward her, circling her twice where she stands as the guards step back. He looks her over from head to toe before reaching out to touch her hair; Annie shudders as he rubs the silky strands between his fingers.

“I have plans for you, my dear Miss Cresta.”

Turning, Snow smiles when he stops in front of Peeta and straightens his collar, centering something pointed and dangerous-looking against the hollow at the base of Peeta’s throat. It’s only then that Annie realizes what she had thought was mere decoration is actually white metal, the point sharp enough to pierce skin if Peeta moves the wrong way.

Snow takes two more steps to the left, stopping in front of Johanna. “You look lovely, Miss Mason. The blonde suits you.” Annie sees the sudden tension in her, the rage burning in her dark eyes. Without warning, Johanna spits in Snow’s face. His smile slips. An answering rage, ice to Johanna’s fire, moves behind his blue eyes as he pulls out a snowy white handkerchief to wipe the saliva from his cheek. There’s a thin line of red on the fabric before he folds it and replaces it in his pocket. “Make no mistake, my dear, you will pay for that.”

“Nothing worth doing is free.”

He nods to someone behind Annie and a hand takes hold of her elbow, pulling her away from the others. As Snow resumes his seat, the guard leads Annie off to the side, away from the throne and the bright lights.

Standing out of the way and under guard, Annie watches as a film crew goes to work, taking video as well as stills of Snow, Johanna, and Peeta, sometimes together, sometimes individually. Occasionally Snow’s prep team touches up their appearance as the photo shoot continues.

Why am I here? she asks herself, but she doesn’t really want to know the answer. She leans back against the wall and wishes she was almost anyplace else. Snow always has a reason for what he does, even flat out told her that he has plans for her. Whatever he wants her for, it’s nothing she could ever want for herself. There’s nothing she can do but wait.

Eventually the photoshoot ends. The camera crew packs up their equipment. The lights go dark. Avoxes arrive to dismantle and remove the throne. Peacekeepers lead Johanna and Peeta from the room, leaving Annie there with Snow and his personal guards. Without a word, Snow leaves the room, and she and the guards follow.

Winding their way through the mansion, they pass few people. Those they do pass stare at Annie, who stares straight ahead, hoping she doesn’t lose her balance on the unaccustomed shoes, her gaze fixed on the shining white armor of the guard in front of her. There’s a rough patch just below the right shoulder, discolored, a streak of dirty gray marring the pristine white. If she concentrates, she can make out a slight tear in the armor itself, not all the way through, but just a crack in the surface. A weakness she doesn’t know how to exploit.

Annie laughs softly to herself. Even if she did know what to do, it’s not as though she could escape this place. She tried that once before, and Snow’s tentacles, like those of a squid, dragged her back. He isn’t feeding on her yet, but she has a feeling that won’t last long now that he’s remembered her existence.

She’s already seeing a change in Johanna, at least physically. Peeta looks the same as he always has, save for the dark shadows under his eyes, the growing pallor of his skin as they all spend more and more time away from sunlight, fresh air, rest. But Johanna. Slightly built, she’s becoming emaciated. There are shadows under her eyes, too, but they compete with the bruises on her skin, which is becoming sallow; her prep team covered them up with makeup for the photoshoot. The guards have taken Johanna from the cell block several times that Annie knows of, most of them far less benign than this outing seems to be.

And now it’s Annie’s turn. She doesn’t know what to expect as she follows the Peacekeepers who in turn follow the president, but it certainly isn’t that she and Snow would leave the building or that they would stop at a waiting limousine. While the guards remain standing to either side of Annie, the driver opens the door for Snow, who smiles, gesturing for her to precede him. As she passes near, a thin streak of red along a petal of the white rose in his white lapel catches her attention and won’t let go. She stares, transfixed, breathing in the scent of copper beneath the sweetness of the rose itself. It isn’t until Snow touches her elbow, silently ordering her to enter the car that another drop of blood stains another petal and she realizes that red streak isn’t a natural pigment of the rose.

Closing her eyes against the sight of the blood, Annie slides into the back seat of the limousine, moving as far away from the president as she can.

It will never be far enough.

xXx

Finnick only catches a glimpse of the District 13 war room as Dalton leads him along a wall past the backs of a rack of television monitors. No one pays them any attention. Save for the plastic bracelet on his wrist that designates him “mentally disoriented,” nothing about either Finnick or his lanky escort sets them apart from any of the dozen or so men and women in the room. It’s nice to more or less blend in, to not feel everyone staring at him. For the first time since he was a boy, Finnick feels a sense of anonymity.

“Welp, I’ll be leaving you here, Finn,” Dalton says, stopping before a closed door marked only with a black number one. Figuring it’s a lost cause, Finnick doesn’t bother to correct him again; he’d kept calling Katniss “Kat,” too. Dalton raps twice on the door and steps back, spinning around to leave, giving Finnick a brief wave on his way out of the war room.

A moment later, door number one opens and the dark-skinned man Finnick saw at Coin’s side a few days earlier opens it, ushering Finnick into a small office. He vaguely recalls someone telling him the man’s name a million years ago, but he can’t for the life of him remember it.

The room is barely large enough for the three people already there, let alone them and Finnick, who’s not a small man. Alma Coin sits between a heavy, utilitarian desk and a wall-to-ceiling shelving unit. A small television on the corner of her desk, the sound turned down, shows a Capitol newsfeed. Plutarch Heavensbee, relaxed and smiling, sits in a chair across from Coin.

“Have a seat, Citizen Odair.” Coin gestures toward a vacant chair, the only other piece of furniture in the room. Coin’s man stands ramrod straight beside the door. When Finnick glances his way, he inclines his head toward the chair. After a moment’s hesitation, Finnick sits. Without Katniss, without Haymitch, he feels exposed and vulnerable. It doesn’t help that he hasn’t seen or heard from Haymitch in days.

“Finnick, you’re looking much better than when I last saw you.” Heavensbee’s right ankle rests on his left knee, his right foot bouncing in air. The drab gray clothing and utilitarian boots look incongruous on the ex-Gamemaker.

“That’s not hard to do,” Finnick responds, forcing a grin. Glancing from Heavensbee to Coin, outwardly ignoring her lackey, he asks Heavensbee, “Where’s Haymitch? I thought you two were joined at the hip.”

“Citizen Abernathy is undergoing detoxification in our medical wing,” Coin answers. She leans forward to rest her forearms on the edge of her desk, intertwining her fingers. Her nearly colorless eyes travel over Finnick’s face and body, assessing him like a mechanic searching for the right tool. “Have you had any luck yet with the girl?” she asks, and although she’s looking right at Finnick, it’s obvious the question isn’t meant for him.

“Don’t worry,” Plutarch answers. “She’ll come around.”

“So you keep assuring me.” Coin’s gaze shifts to Heavensbee before returning once more to Finnick. She leans back in her chair. The picture on the television to her left flickers, and a rainbow crowd of people parts for the passage of a long white limousine. Finnick doesn’t need to see the presidential seal on the door to know it’s there.

“Why don’t we use this one instead?”

Finnick glances at Coin, half his attention still on the television, a sick feeling growing in his gut.

Heavensbee shakes his head. A too-long lock of sandy hair falls loose, and he brushes it back from his forehead.

“The people won’t follow him. It has to be Katniss.”

On the television, the car draws to a stop and the driver, dressed all in white, gets out and opens the rear passenger side door for President Snow. A shock of white hair. A perfectly tailored white suit, signature white rose in his lapel. Finnick blinks. His muscles tense as white noise begins to build in his head when Snow reaches into the limousine to help someone out.

“Your Mockingjay fights us at every turn. Until she comes around, we’ll use Citizen Odair for our propos. I’m sure the people will buy whatever he’s selling.” Coin’s lackey watches Finnick as the other two continue discussing him as they would a useful piece of furniture. He stifles a snort of bitter-edged laughter. It’s not the first time.

The newsfeed zooms in on the woman emerging from the car. Finnick’s heart stops when he sees her hand first, followed by one delicate-looking ankle and foot. Silver high-heeled shoes. A white dress that clings to her body like a second skin until it flares out below her hips, the skirt of it pouring out of the car like a small waterfall as Snow draws her to his side. Delicate silver chains hold the sides of the dress together, leaving a three-inch gap of exposed skin.

“Annie…”

She’s thin and pale, and even remake can’t erase the blueish shadows under her eyes. She looks like a ghost of herself, the only splashes of color her dark hair falling in curls over her bare shoulders and her eyes like green glass, beautiful and empty. Finnick has seen that look so many times. She’s gone away, hiding inside herself as Snow places a proprietary hand on her waist. He whispers something in Annie’s ear and on command she smiles.

Finnick feels himself slipping away as that white noise grows louder, drowning out the sound of Coin’s voice, drowning out the sound of his own choking as he fights just to breathe.

Chapter Text

Chapter 6 – If I Smile and Don't Believe

The limousine floats over the streets of the Capitol as though it doesn’t dare jostle the person of the president. Annie watches the scenery rush past, light and shadow and utter darkness. The sun had set long since, the silent car made so many twists and turns she has no idea where they are or where they’re going. Snow is content to let her ignore him, for now, but she’s sure that will end when they reach their destination. She shivers, goose flesh popping up on her bare arms.

“Turn up the air conditioning temperature, Maximus. Miss Cresta is uncomfortable.”

Annie snorts, bites her lower lip to keep from saying anything, from making another sound that might draw Snow’s attention. She’d like to forget everything, forget where she is, what’s happened to her and the others. But every time the limo passes beneath a street light or near any of the myriad neon signs that dot the city’s landscape after dark, she sees Snow reflected behind her in the car’s window.

They leave the heart of the city, and the neon lights become nothing more than a sickly glow on the horizon. Other lights cut through the growing night, but those are fewer and fewer as the minutes tick by.

Snow says her name, and Annie jumps, but he isn’t talking to her. She can’t hear the other end of the call, nor does she want to; it’s obvious he’s discussing her. His voice drones on in the background, punctuated by chuckles that make her skin crawl. She closes her eyes, wishing she could close her ears and resisting the urge to cover them with her hands. That would be just one more thing to draw Snow’s attention.

Images chase one after the other in her mind, bringing bile rising to burn her throat even as she chokes it back down. Finnick’s haunted green eyes. His too smooth skin where his Capitol handlers remade him to beauty base zero so no one would see the marks his “lovers” left behind. Finnick curled into a ball in their bed post-nightmare; the screams were bad enough, but the whimpers were worse.

“Don’t let him see your fear.” Finnick’s voice. She can all but feel the warmth of his breath at the nape of her neck. “He feeds on it.”

The car slows to a stop. Annie opens her eyes on her own reflection staring back at her. She exhales on a shudder as the door opens behind her and a man steps back to allow Snow to exit. A whoosh of dry, dusty summer air swirls into the car, carrying with it strains of music, brassy and martial. A moment later her door opens and a pale hand floats into her vision.

“Miss Cresta.”

He said my name three times. Does that make me more real? Annie sucks in a quick breath and swallows another giggle at the absurd thought. After that brief hesitation, she places her hand in Snow’s, suddenly overwhelmed by the memory of Mags and Finnick and another summer night. Of a small fire on the beach and ghost tales, a story of a dead girl’s blood-soaked spirit summoned by saying her name three times.

The moment Annie steps from the car, flashes of light blind her. She blinks. Snow squeezes her hand just short of pain and she fixes a smile on her face. It feels like a death mask. Keeping hold of her hand as though she might bolt — an event not outside the realm of possibility — Snow pulls her close to his side as he raises his free hand in greeting. And still the lights flash. People call Snow’s name. Her name. Annie fixes her gaze on the hem of Snow’s assistant’s white jacket as he leads them into a mansion carved into a mountainside. There’s a smudge on the fabric, marring the pristine perfection. It seems to be my lot in life, noticing all the little imperfections brought to white uniforms.

Inside the entryway, all marble and granite hewn by expert stone masons, men and women flow in eddies and rills, brilliantly hued fish swimming to see and be seen. Snow introduces her to many of them — actors, musicians, sports figures mingle with government figures and jumble together in Annie’s head. The Capitol’s elite, its rich and famous all want to meet her. Bile rises again, scorching. Finnick told her stories about some of them. Most of them. She’s sure he didn’t tell her everything. Annie holds desperately to her plastic smile.

When Snow introduces her to his Minister of Defense, the man strokes her hip through the gap of her dress with the back of his hand. She can’t escape, not this man, not the room, not Snow. All she can do is endure. Annie’s smile slips, fog seeps in at the edges of her vision, and she begins to hum.

“Did you say something, my dear?”

Her eyes widen at Snow’s question and her voice stills, the hummed song continuing only in her mind. She shakes her head, her smile and her heart empty as the introductions go on and on and on. A woman whose violet dress matches her violet hair and eyes, the sparkling jewels embedded in twin thin lines defining her cheekbones plants a lingering kiss on Annie’s wrist. The song in Annie’s head grows louder, the disjointed melody wrapping around Finnick’s inadvertent lyrics — don’t let them see your fear — to drown the names and titles, the scent and sound and feel of each person she meets.

Cameras flash, jewels and sequins glitter, skin and satin glow, greetings and compliments and questions — so many questions about Annie and Finnick and the Games, the defection of the Victors, what did she know, when did she know it, why why why. Annie doesn’t know how long she endures it until finally she snaps. She flees, kicking off the high heels to run across the marble floor, bare feet slapping as she slips through dancers and minglers, leaving puzzled stares and outraged whispers in her wake. She feels them watching her as she runs, but she doesn’t care.

Annie brushes and shoves past bodies until she runs into a solid wall of white. She focuses on the single bright spot of color before her eyes. A single, perfect red bud.

“It’s become quite late, Miss Cresta. Shall we?” Snow offers her a thin red smile and his right arm. Her vision blurring, heart pounding, soul screaming, all she can do is accept.

xXx

Rhythmic beeps entwine with the rise and fall of a woman’s voice, low and soothing. A lullaby, he thinks, though he doesn’t recognize the tune. A cool draft blows over his face, and Finnick shivers, tries to pull the covers more snugly over himself, but the sheets are too tight. Annie’s voice swells like a wave as the song reaches its crescendo. He tries to roll onto his side, his face toward Annie, but he can’t move anything more than his fingers and toes. And that’s when it hits him.

The sheets aren’t too tight; he’s strapped down.

Finnick opens his eyes. The first thing he sees is the white and gray drop ceiling tiles above his bed in the hospital wing of District 13. It’s not Annie humming a lullaby but Katniss. He blinks. The beeps come faster, seem louder. Shifting, he looks down at his body beneath the thin white sheet, his feet tenting the fabric less than they should because his heels are hanging off the end of the bed. He glances at Katniss, sitting in the middle of her bed in her gray uniform, sketching on an odd-shaped sheet of paper, probably a page torn from a book. Sitting up, he yanks the electronic leads from his left arm and hand and swings his bare legs over the side of the bed as the suddenly disconnected machinery screams in protest.

“You’re awake.”

He snorts. “Can’t get anything past you, can I?” Katniss shoots him a look but doesn’t stop sketching. Finnick scrubs his fingers through his hair, throws his head left then right then left again until he feels a pop.

“Ow.” Katniss glares at him this time, her pencil going still on the paper. “Can you not do that?”

Before he has a chance to answer, a nurse rushes in to check on the unhappy monitors. He bustles over to switch off the alarm and for a moment Finnick thinks the man is going to try to push him back down and reapply the electrodes. Finnick raises an eyebrow and crosses his arms over his chest and the man stops.

“Citizen Odair,” he begins, and Finnick raises the other brow.

“I’m fine, Nurse…” He racks his memory for the man’s name. “Bellamy. I’ll call you if I need anything.” As if they were in a Capitol hotel and not a rebel hospital half a mile underground. The man cocks his head but says nothing, just lays the abandoned leads on the end of the bed and walks back out, leaving Katniss and Finnick alone. Or as alone as a constantly monitored room can be.

Just him and Katniss. No sign there was ever anyone else in their room. Finnick frowns. Annie’s gone, Johanna’s gone, Haymitch is gone. Not that any of them were ever here, anyway.

“Where’s Beetee?”

Katniss shifts, stretches her legs out and leans back against the gray wall. “He woke up a couple of hours ago. Colburn said he was as healthy as he was going to get. They wheeled him off to design weapons or something.” She returns to her sketch.

His brain is still foggy, and he wonders if they gave him something. The last thing he remembers is Annie stepping out of that car, standing beside Snow, and that empty smile. Finnick scrunches his eyes shut so hard he sees lightning flashes, white against blood red. He shakes his head to rid himself of those images, of the sure knowledge of Annie alone and rudderless, adrift in a sea of Snow.

“You might want to get dressed.” Katniss’ voice drags him out of the fog. He opens his eyes, his vision still blurry as he tries to focus on her. “You already missed both breakfast and lunch. We’re supposed to be in nuclear history in half an hour.” And still she sketches, the scratch of pencil on paper drilling its way into his head, maddening. “It’s better than their civics class.” She finally looks up at Finnick, dark hair falling partially over her eyes. “That’s where I’m supposed to be now, but the teacher is a droner.” She shrugs; the scratching resumes. “So I came back here to check on you.”

Finnick snorts but doesn’t call her out on the lie. Maybe she did come back to check on him, but only as an afterthought, something to justify ditching her class.

“Glad I could be of service.” She shoots him a look and shifts the pencil between her fingers as she rubs her index finger over part of her sketch, smudging the lines. Genuine curiosity starts an itch inside his head; it’s a welcome distraction to thoughts of Annie’s future in Snow’s hands. “What is that you’re working on?”

“Nothing.” She folds the scrap of paper and shoves it into a pocket along with her pencil, but not before Finnick catches a glimpse of a succulent plant, the smudged area adding depth to leaves swollen with moisture.

They both jump when the door opens and Dr. Colburn walks in unannounced. She stops, her hand still on the doorknob at the sight of Katniss, frowns. Katniss jumps down from the cot.

“I’ve got to go.” She makes a show of checking the schedule tattooed on her arm. “I have to find Prim before that class starts.”

“Citizen Everdeen,” Colburn begins, but Katniss brushes past her and out the door, leaving Finnick wishing he could follow. He has no desire to talk to Colburn.

“Well, Citizen Odair,” the woman lifts the clipboard hanging from the foot of Finnick’s bed, “let’s see how we’re doing today.” She checks the clock on the wall behind Finnick and then notes the time on the chart. “I understand you had a bit of a shock yesterday.”

Finnick frowns. Yesterday? How long has he been out of it? And what the fuck did they give him this time? The meeting with Coin is the last thing he remembers.

“Citizen Odair.” Finnick blinks, focuses on Colburn, who has apparently been speaking for a while. The doctor rehangs the chart and pulls a vial from her pocket, holding it up, tapping it lightly. A moment later, she’s drawing that liquid into a needle, squirting a bit of it out to remove any air bubbles. “This will help you sleep.”

“I don’t need to sleep.” He pushes away from the doctor, but there’s nowhere to go. “No. No more—” Colburn manages to swab a spot on Finnick’s right arm and injects him with the clear substance. “—drugs.”

“I’ll have Nurse Bellamy check on you in a few hours, Citizen Odair.” She lifts the chart once more and makes a new notation. “Sleep is what you need right now. I’ll adjust your schedule accordingly.” As if his protests are the result of being off his schedule.

The lights in the room blur and fade, recede into the distance. Colburn’s voice takes on a metallic quality, reverberating more with each syllable until it’s nothing but a buzzing in his ears. His last thought is a promise to himself to focus if it kills him.

xXx

“I hate white.” Johanna looks toward the ceiling with its too-bright lights. “You hear that, Snow? I fucking hate white.” Her shout is all the louder for the size of the room, four beauty stations crammed into a space no larger than twelve feet by twelve. Along the wall to the left of the door, prep teams dress Johanna and Peeta in the same costumes they wore for their photo shoot with Snow, which hang on them like white sacks after four more days of near starvation. Enobaria and Shale went home to District 2 that morning, under orders to remain in the Victors Village there. I’m glad they’re out of this, Annie thinks, whatever ‘this’ is.

A sharp tap on her cheek brings Annie’s attention back to her own prep team. “Eyes forward and closed,” the man orders as he rolls his own bright green eyes. “It’s like working with damned cats.” His partner titters, running her fingers through Annie’s hair, pulling it tight at the top of her head while he paints a base coat onto her left eyelid, then her right. He blows on the paint to dry it, sending coffee-scented breath washing over her face. She can’t help but wonder what happened to the pair who worked on her before.

“At least yours is a decent canvas to work with, Artur. Mine is so skinny everything I do just makes her look more like a ghoul.”

“Bitch.” Annie forces herself not to smile at Johanna’s commentary or the gasps around the room that it sparks.

The teams work in silence after that, although Annie hears an occasional whisper from the other teams as they discuss options. Annie remains still, the living canvas her prep team considers her to be. She has no desire to open her eyes again, to let in that blinding light, instead content to drift inside her own skull with cotton clouds in an azure sky and the waves crashing on a sugar sand beach. In the distance, a man walks along that beach, his bronze hair glinting copper in the sun.

“Oh for the love of…” Annie jumps at the touch of a dry cotton pad at the corner of her left eye. “Stop that.”

“What’s going on?” one of Silke’s team asks.

“The silly girl is crying, destroying all my hard work!”

A shadow blocks the light leaking through Annie’s lids. A snort, then “You’re exaggerating, Artur.” The woman brushes a fingertip over the offending moisture, a butterfly’s touch. “There. It’s fixed. You don’t want hard lines on a girl as lovely as this one anyway.”

Annie’s eyes fly open to the most bizarre woman she’s ever seen. Her skin is pale near her flattened nose, shading from cream to orange along her jaw and cheekbones, dark tiger stripes tattooed over her face, the left side a reflection of the right. There are long white whiskers around her nose and mouth. She smiles at Annie, a widening of almost nonexistent lips, narrowing of large tawny eyes, and the tight knot of fear inside Annie relaxes. There’s no telling how old the woman might be, but somehow, she reminds her of Mags.

“This one is soft, Artur, but I bet she has sharp claws.” The tiger-woman strokes Annie’s cheek with the back of her hand before letting it drop to her side.

“Mind your business, Tigris.” A giggle bubbles beneath the surface as Annie thinks, Of course, her name is Tigris. She smiles at the woman, surprised by the display of kindness. “President Snow gave her to me to prepare, not you. You wouldn’t even be here if there was anyone else left.” Tigris’ eyes narrow at the sound of Snow’s name, though not in amusement, and her jaw tightens even as she lets out a faint hiss.

The door opens and a Peacekeeper leans in, his head and shoulders all that’s visible. “The car is here for those two.” He nods toward Johanna and Peeta. “Don’t forget the President wants the boy for that interview later.”

The man leaves, the door clicking shut behind him. A flurry of activity surrounds Peeta and Johanna and then they’re gone, leaving the other prep teams to work on Annie and Silke at a more leisurely pace. By the time they’re finished, where the other two victors wore all white, Annie and Silke are orange and red.

Silke’s short, white-blond hair sweeps upward in a stiff wave held in place by a simple red comb. She wears no jewelry, but her team painted subtle designs on her pale skin, thin red lines, all sharp angles with not a curve in sight. The collar of her red uniform is high, the creases on her trouser legs crisp. Her lips are red, as are her nails. They even painted her eye lashes a bright tomato red to match the contact lenses coloring her eyes and the uniform clinging to her slender body. She’s a terrifying sight as a pair of Peacekeepers escort her from the room, her head high as her prep team cleans up their space.

Annie glances down at her form-fitting dress, shimmering under the bright lights, looking as though they’d painted it on her. Her arms and shoulders are bare. The tanned skin of her shoulders fades into luminescent copper and gold becomes copper and gold scales formed over her breasts, sculpting her rib cage, the muscles of her torso. The metallic hues turn to pearlescent orange and crimson, deepening in the skirt and with edges and flashes of aquamarine and emerald as she moves, the hem brushing the tops of her bare feet. The dress is breathtaking.

She startles when a black-gloved hand closes around her left arm. Her prep team steps back to allow the new set of Peacekeepers to take her away. They lead her through white hallways to an elevator that releases them directly onto an alley, its cobblestoned surface unnaturally clean beneath Annie’s bare soles. Why haven’t they given me shoes? She blinks against the sunlight filtering down between tall buildings; the shafts of light don’t quite reach the rough surface, stopping short about ten feet above Annie’s head. Not knowing which direction she faces, she can’t tell if it’s morning or afternoon. She was in remake for hours, she’s sure of that much, but not how many. It seemed like forever.

Where the alley opens onto a wider cobblestone street, a photographer and her crew greet the trio, and the Peacekeepers hand Annie over to another pair, a couple wearing civilian clothes instead of uniforms, but Annie knows they’re Peacekeepers. They both eye her with appreciation and contempt in equal measure.

And so begins a photo shoot that transports Annie back to her Victory Tour, except Finnick isn’t there to help her through it. No one can help her. The photographer and her crew pose Annie like a mannequin in front of store shops, inside the shops, tell her to laugh or to ooh and ah over some sight, some product or other. The civilian-clad Peacekeepers play as though they’re her friends, also following instructions to laugh or flirt with Annie. It all blurs together in her head, and she distances herself from what’s happening, humming children’s tunes or just humming random notes, tuning out the photographer’s growing list of complaints and insults.

“Miss Cresta.”

The white noise in Annie’s head stops. She hurtles back to the here and now, the sun lowering in the Capitol sky as the afternoon wanes. Her gaze focuses, for the first time in hours, on the white-haired man standing before her in his pristine white suit, the reflected sunlight not warming his ice-blue eyes one whit.

“Ah. That’s better.” He smiles, and her heart beats faster. She wants to run, but she can’t, her feet frozen to the stone street. Snow paces around her as her guards step backward, and she can feel the president’s cold gaze, drizzle on a winter’s day despite the late-summer heat. “I’m not sure what your handlers have told you, my dear, but nothing I’ve seen of you this afternoon makes me believe you’ve renounced the rebellion or your fellow victors and their lies.” Annie’s eyes widen. She swallows, blinks, stares at a shop window just past Snow’s right shoulder. A glass dolphin rising from an ocean wave catches the dying light, bringing the tiny creature to life.

The photographer begins a litany of Annie’s faults during the shoot, her voice rising higher with each one until Snow raises a hand. She falls silent, and he returns to ignoring her, all of his attention remaining on Annie.

“You need to make me believe you are with us, Miss Cresta. A citizen of Panem, of the Capitol, that you want to be here. Renounce District Four and its petty squabbles with us.” He takes a step closer to Annie, brushes a tendril of hair from her neck and shoulders. She shivers. “Make me believe you are Capitol, through and through.” He lays both hands on her shoulders, his touch dry, chill. “Do we have an understanding?”

Annie nods, fighting the urge to run, to scream, to cover her ears, close her eyes and never open them again. Snow steps away, dropping his hands to his sides.

The shoot begins again, and Annie tries, smiling, laughing on cue, even twirling on the street with a diaphanous silk shawl flaring out around her like wings. The light cover of clouds overhead takes on a salmon hue as sunset approaches. Snow snaps his fingers and once more everything stops. Annie’s gaze flies to the man, who shakes his head at her. Her heart plummets.

A wordless sound of rage breaks the silence, soon followed by something scraping across the cobblestones. A pair of Peacekeepers drag a struggling Johanna Mason into view from a side alley. Her blond wig is gone, her white costume replaced by the gray uniform of a Capitol prisoner. Although it’s hopeless, Johanna doesn’t stop fighting.

“Please,” Annie breathes. “Please, don’t hurt her.” As they stop in front of Annie, her gaze locks with Johanna’s.

Behind her, Snow chuckles. “I trust your performance will improve, Miss Cresta.”

xXx

A string of days blur together following Finnick’s vow to himself to focus. There’s a sameness to them that in another time and place might have been comforting. Finnick wakes, receives his schedule tattoo, goes to breakfast, to a class on District 13’s history followed by lunch — the only time he sees Katniss until lights out —and then a session with Dr. Aurelius in the afternoon. There’s a rhythm to the sessions as Aurelius seeks to set Finnick at ease, to build a kind of trust between them, and to a certain extent, it works. Finnick lets down his guard, little by little, until one afternoon, he makes a mistake.

A Capitol news broadcast had played during lunch. Finnick hadn’t paid much attention to it until the scene on the television changed to the square in District 4 and a bloody clash between his own people and a group of Peacekeepers. The District 4 rebels had been defeated, many of the them left lying dead or bleeding in the square. The scene had tightened in on a man he’d once gone to school with lying in a pool of blood, dark eyes staring sightless toward the brilliant blue of the sky. It then faded into a scene of a beautiful young woman, the flare of her blood red dress flashing with cerulean, laughing as she spun in place on a Capitol street.

Annie.

“And how did seeing her make you feel, Finnick?”

He glances at the doctor sitting cross-legged across from him, pencil in hand and clipboard balanced on one knee, looks down at his own hands, his fingers twitching as they work tiny, invisible knots in imaginary string. “I wished I was dead.” His voice drops to a whisper. “That she was dead.”

The moment the words leave his mouth he knows what’s coming. It had been a momentary distraction, the thought of what Snow had done to her to make her play along like that, and that simple truth will mean days, maybe weeks more of talk talk talk talk talk. Maybe worse.

Aurelius’ eyes widen and his mouth goes slack for a heartbeat. Finnick straightens in his chair, clasps his restless fingers into fists he pushes down beside his thighs, out of the man’s direct line of sight. Aurelius scans his notes, scribbles something in the margins, and when he returns his attention to Finnick once more, his calm, dispassionate demeanor is back, tinged with sympathy. At least that’s something new, Finnick thinks, although the sinking feeling in his gut remains. The doctor hadn’t asked how the story about home had made him feel. He doesn’t know if his relationship with Annie is common knowledge in 13, but Aurelius is obviously aware.

The session continues, and Finnick does his best to remedy the damage he’s done with his careless comment. The subject doesn’t come up again before Dalton arrives to take Finnick to the dining hall for dinner, and he’s hopeful his change in attitude worked. After dinner, he returns to his hospital room for an hour of nightly reflection to find a nurse waiting for him with a syringe.

Projecting nonchalance he doesn’t feel, Finnick greets her and nods toward her hand. “What’s that about?”

“I’m Nurse Kelly, Citizen Odair, and Doctor Aurelius has prescribed a sedative,” she raises her hand, “for your safety.” The woman smiles, and it seems genuine, but Finnick spins on his heels toward the hallway. One step outside the door and he slams into Nurse Bellamy. He smiles at Finnick, too, but there’s no friendliness in it. Biting his tongue against any more slips, Finnick raises his hands in surrender. It’s not a battle he can win, not right now.

“Can we at least switch to pills after this? I’m starting to feel like a pincushion.”

When Finnick wakes the next morning, Katniss is there. She sits on her bed in her official gray District 13 shirt and trousers, swinging her legs back and forth, back and forth.

“Good morning?” Finnick greets her.

She shrugs. “I’m moving in with my sister and mother today.”

The floor drops out from beneath Finnick, setting him adrift. He grins at her to cover his near-panic. “Congratulations, Katniss. Can’t be any worse than here.”

She snorts at that. “Don’t be so sure.” But she does give him a small smile.

“So I guess this is goodbye.”

Another shrug. “Well, we’ll still have classes together in the mornings.” She waves her scheduled arm at him, and then she grins. “If I go.”

“You’ll have to show me some of your bolt holes.”

“Find your own hiding places, Finnick.” With that, she shoves off the bed. “Get dressed. I’m hungry.”

That afternoon, Finnick asks Aurelius for a length of string so he can keep his hands if not his mind occupied. Aurelius denies the request. Finnick bites back a snarky comment — it doesn’t have to be long enough for me to hang myself — instead, accepting the verdict with feigned good humor. For the rest of the session, he gives Aurelius a mixture of the truth and what the doctor wants to hear, the type of lie Finnick has grown adept at over the years.

Instead of returning to his room for reflection after dinner that night, he spends the hour in the hospital ward’s nursing station, flirting with the staff and stewing internally over how useless he’s become. At least at home, he could work with his father and uncles, good physical work to keep his mind off other things. District 13 is somehow worse even than the Capitol; there he could tease information from the men and women he spent time with. The only information he gleans from the hospital staff is confirmation that Katniss has been released to her family and that Dalton’s story about a plague that wiped out both children and fertility in the district was true.

When he goes to his room before lights out, he finds a cup with two pills in it and a note from Aurelius. You did well today, Finnick. If your improvement continues, we can look at expanding your responsibilities. G.A.

Finnick rolls his eyes and crumples the note. He thinks about tossing the pills into the toilet, but in the end, he smooths out the paper and takes his medicine like a good little boy. There are cameras in his room, after all, and he doesn’t want to jeopardize that promised taste of freedom.