Cathing Fire

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

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

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

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

“Oh, I know what he wants,” says Joha

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

There's something odd about Joha

Joha

My fingers tighten on the knife handle at my belt.

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

I know I can't kill her right now. But it's just a matter of time with Joha

“Maybe we all had better be careful where we step,” says Fi

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

“I'd like to go to the Cornucopia and watch. Just to make sure we're right about the clock,” says Fi

Beetee and Wiress will probably find some way to die on their own. If we have to run from something, how far would they get? Joha

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

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

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

Wiress nods and scampers over to the water's edge, where she dunks the coil in the water. She starts quietly singing some fu

“Oh, not the song again,” says Joha

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

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

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

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

“What's that?” Fi

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

“What's it do, die?” asks Joha

“It stops singing first. That's when you should get out. But if the air's too bad, it dies, yes. And so do you.” I don't want to talk about dying songbirds. They bring up thoughts of my father's death and Rue's death and Maysilee Do

I go back to imagining killing the president.

Despite her a

While I've been messing with the weapons, Peeta's been squatting on the ground, drawing something with the tip of his knife on a large, smooth leaf he brought from the jungle.

I look over his shoulder and see he's creating a map of the arena. In the center is the Cornucopia on its circle of sand with the twelve strips branching out from it. It looks like a pie sliced into twelve equal wedges. There's another circle representing the waterline and a slightly larger one indicating the edge of the jungle. “Look how the Cornucopia's positioned,” he says to me.

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

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

“And ten to eleven is the wave,” I say. He adds it. Fi

“Did you notice anything unusual in the others?” I ask Joha

“I'm going to mark the ones where we know the Gamemakers' weapon follows us out past the jungle, so we'll stay clear of those,” says Peeta, drawing diagonal lines on the fog and wave beaches. Then he sits back. “Well, it's a lot more than we knew this morning, anyway.”