he screams. “run!”
behind him, cato slashes his way through the brush. he’s
sparkling wet, too, and badly stung under one eye. i catch the
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gleam of sunlight on his sword and do as peeta says. holding
tightly to my bow and arrows, banging into trees that appear
out of nowhere, tripping and falling as i try to keep my bal-
ance. back past my pool and into unfamiliar woods. the world
begins to bend in alarming ways. a butterfly balloons to the
size of a house then shatters into a million stars. trees trans-
form to blood and splash down over my boots. ants begin to
crawl out of the blisters on my hands and i can’t shake them
free. they’re climbing up my arms, my neck. someone’s
screaming, a long high pitched scream that never breaks for
breath. i have a vague idea it might be me. i trip and fall into a
small pit lined with tiny orange bubbles that hum like the
tracker jacker nest. tucking my knees up to my chin, i wait for
death.
sick and disoriented, i’m able to form only one thought:
peeta mellark just saved my life.
then the ants bore into my eyes and i black out.
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i enter a nightmare from which i wake repeatedly only to
find a greater terror awaiting me. all the things i dread most,
all the things i dread for others manifest in such vivid detail i
can’t help but believe they’re real. each time i wake, i think, at
last, this is over, but it isn’t. it’s only the beginning of a new
chapter of torture. how many ways do i watch prim die? re-
live my father’s last moments? feel my own body ripped
apart? this is the nature of the tracker jacker venom, so care-
fully created to target the place where fear lives in your brain.
when i finally do come to my senses, i lie still, waiting for
the next onslaught of imagery. but eventually i accept that the
poison must have finally worked its way out of my system,
leaving my body wracked and feeble. i’m still lying on my side,
locked in the fetal position. i lift a hand to my eyes to find
them sound, untouched by ants that never existed. simply
stretching out my limbs requires an enormous effort. so many
parts of me hurt, it doesn’t seem worthwhile taking inventory
of them. very, very slowly i manage to sit up. i’m in a shallow
hole, not filled with the humming orange bubbles of my hallu-
cination but with old, dead leaves. my clothing’s damp, but i
don’t know whether pond water, dew, rain, or sweat is the
cause. for a long time, all i can do is take tiny sips from my
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bottle and watch a beetle crawl up the side of a honeysuckle
bush.
how long have i been out? it was morning when i lost rea-
son. now it’s afternoon. but the stiffness in my joints suggests
more than a day has passed, even two possibly. if so, i’ll have
no way of knowing which tributes survived that tracker jacker
attack. not glimmer or the girl from district 4. but there was
the boy from district 1, both tributes from district 2, and pee-
ta. did they die from the stings? certainly if they lived, their
last days must have been as horrid as my own. and what
about rue? she’s so small, it wouldn’t take much venom to do
her in. but then again . . . the tracker jackers would’ve had to
catch her, and she had a good head start.
a foul, rotten taste pervades my mouth, and the water has
little effect on it. i drag myself over to the honeysuckle bush
and pluck a flower. i gently pull the stamen through the blos-
som and set the drop of nectar on my tongue. the sweetness
spreads through my mouth, down my throat, warming my
veins with memories of summer, and my home woods and
gale’s presence beside me. for some reason, our discussion
from that last morning comes back to me.
“we could do it, you know.”
“what?”
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