If I feel ragged, my prep team seems in worse condition, knocking back coffee and sharing brightly colored little pills. As far as I can tell, they never get up before noon unless there’s some sort of national emergency, like my leg hair.
One slip. One slip in thousands. The odds had been entirely in her favor. But it hadn’t mattered.
Gale is mine. I am his. Anything else is unthinkable.
You’ve got about as much charm as a dead slug.
If you appeal to the crowd, either by being humorous or brutal or eccentric, you gain favor.
The hatred I feel for him, for the phantom girl, for everything, is so real and immediate it chokes me. Gale is mine. I am his. Anything else is unthinkable. Why did it take him being whipped within an inch of his life to see it?
My mother says healers are born, not made.
When I break into the clearing, she’s on the ground, hopelessly entangled in a net. She just has the time to reach her hand through the mesh and say my name before the spear enters her body.
I can see the first apple teetering when I let the third arrow go, catching the torn flap and ripping it from the bag. For a moment, everything seems frozen in time. Then the apples spill to the ground and I’m blown backward into the air.
District 12: Where you can starve to death in safety.
So I learned to hold my tongue and to turn my features into an indifferent mask so that no one could ever read my thoughts.
So instead of acknowledging applause, I stand there unmoving while they take part in the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong.
You can tell by the way the girls whisper about him when he walks by in school that they want him. It makes me jealous but not for the reason people would think. Good hunting partners are hard to find.
But there’s food if you know how to find it. My father knew and he taught me some before he was blown to bits in a mine explosion. There was nothing even to bury. I was eleven then. Five years later, I still wake up screaming for him to run.
Gale and I were thrown together by a mutual need to survive. Peeta and I know the other’s survival means our own death. How do you side step that?
The star-crossed lovers.
It’s lovely. If only you could frost someone to death.
The morphlings from District 6 are in the camouflage station, painting each other’s faces with bright pink swirls.
We could do it, you know.
It’s as if I’m Finnick, watching images of my life flash by. The mast of a boat, a silver parachute, Mags laughing, a pink sky, Beetee’s trident, Annie in her wedding dress, waves breaking over rocks. Then its over.