Mockingjay

«You,» Gale answers.

«You’ll have to be a little more specific,» says Peeta. «What about me?»

«That they’ve replaced you with the evil-mutt version of yourself,» says Joha

Gale finishes his milk. «You done?» he asks me. I rise and we cross to drop off our trays. At the door, an old man stops me because I’m still clutching the rest of my gravy bread in my hand. Something in my expression, or maybe the fact that I’ve made no attempt to conceal it, makes him go easy on me. He lets me stuff the bread in my mouth and move on. Gale and I are almost to my compartment when he speaks again. «I didn’t expect that.»

«I told you he hated me,» I say.

«It’s the way he hates you. It’s so…familiar. I used to feel like that,» he admits. «When I’d watch you kissing him on the screen. Only I knew I wasn’t being entirely fair. He can’t see that.»

We reach my door. «Maybe he just sees me as I really am. I have to get some sleep.»

Gale catches my arm before I can disappear. «So that’s what you’re thinking now?» I shrug. «Katniss, as your oldest friend, believe me when I say he’s not seeing you as you really are.» He kisses my cheek and goes.

I sit on my bed, trying to stuff information from my Military Tactics books into my head while memories of my nights with Peeta on the train distract me. After about twenty minutes, Joha

«What’d Peeta do?» I ask.

«He started arguing with himself like he was two people. The guards had to take him away. On the good side, no one seemed to notice I finished his stew.» Joha

We spend a couple of hours quizzing each other on military terms. I visit my mother and Prim for a while. When I’m back in my compartment, showered, staring into the darkness, I finally ask, «Joha

«That was part of it,» she says. «Like the jabberjays in the arena. Only it was real. And it didn’t stop after an hour. Tick, tock.»

«Tick, tock,» I whisper back.

Roses. Wolf mutts. Tributes. Frosted dolphins. Friends. Mockingjays. Stylists. Me.

Everything screams in my dreams tonight.

18

I throw myself into training with a vengeance. Eat, live, and breathe the workouts, drills, weapons practice, lectures on tactics. A handful of us are moved into an additional class that gives me hope I may be a contender for the actual war. The soldiers simply call it the Block, but the tattoo on my arm lists it as S.S.C., short for Simulated Street Combat. Deep in 13, they’ve built an artificial Capitol city block. The instructor breaks us into squads of eight and we attempt to carry out missions—gaining a position, destroying a target, searching a home—as if we were really fighting our way through the Capitol. The thing’s rigged so that everything that can go wrong for you does. A false step triggers a land mine, a sniper appears on a rooftop, your gun jams, a crying child leads you into an ambush, your squadron leader—who’s just a voice on the program—gets hit by a mortar and you have to figure out what to do without orders. Part of you knows it’s fake and that they’re not going to kill you. If you set off a land mine, you hear the explosion and have to pretend to fall over dead. But in other ways, it feels pretty real in there—the enemy soldiers dressed in Peacekeepers’ uniforms, the confusion of a smoke bomb. They even gas us. Joha

Cressida and her crew tape Joha

Then Peeta starts showing up for our morning workouts. The manacles are off, but he’s still constantly accompanied by a pair of guards. After lunch, I see him across the field, drilling with a group of begi

When I confront Plutarch, he assures me that it’s all for the camera. They’ve got footage of A

I walk away from the conversation right then. That is not going to happen.

In my rare moments of downtime, I anxiously watch the preparations for the invasions. See equipment and provisions readied, divisions assembled. You can tell when someone’s received orders because they’re given a very short haircut, the mark of a person going into battle. There is much talk of the opening offensive, which will be to secure the train tu

Just a few days before the first troops are to move out, York unexpectedly tells Joha

My weaknesses? That’s a door I don’t even want to open. But I find a quiet spot and try to assess what they might be. The length of the list depresses me. Lack of physical brute force. A bare minimum of training. And somehow my stand-out status as the Mockingjay doesn’t seem to be an advantage in a situation where they’re trying to get us to blend into a pack. They could nail me to the wall on any number of things.

Joha