第13章
i say. wearing a token from my district is about
the last thing on my mind.
“here, i’ll put it on your dress, all right?” madge doesn’t
wait for an answer, she just leans in and fixes the bird to my
dress. “promise you’ll wear it into the arena, katniss?” she
asks. “promise?”
“yes,” i say. cookies. a pin. i’m getting all kinds of gifts to-
day. madge gives me one more. a kiss on the cheek. then she’s
gone and i’m left thinking that maybe madge really has been
my friend all along.
finally, gale is here and maybe there is nothing romantic
between us, but when he opens his arms i don’t hesitate to go
into them. his body is familiar to me — the way it moves, the
smell of wood smoke, even the sound of his heart beating i
know from quiet moments on a hunt — but this is the first
time i really feel it, lean and hard-muscled against my own.
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“listen,” he says. “getting a knife should be pretty easy, but
you’ve got to get your hands on a bow. that’s your best
chance.”
“they don’t always have bows,” i say, thinking of the year
there were only horrible spiked maces that the tributes had to
bludgeon one another to death with.
“then make one,” says gale. “even a weak bow is better
than no bow at all.”
i have tried copying my father’s bows with poor results. it’s
not that easy. even he had to scrap his own work sometimes.
“i don’t even know if there’ll be wood,” i say. another year,
they tossed everybody into a landscape of nothing but bould-
ers and sand and scruffy bushes. i particularly hated that year.
many contestants were bitten by venomous snakes or went
insane from thirst.
“there’s almost always some wood,” gale says. “since that
year half of them died of cold. not much entertainment in
that.”
it’s true. we spent one hunger games watching the players
freeze to death at night. you could hardly see them because
they were just huddled in balls and had no wood for fires or
torches or anything. it was considered very anti-climactic in
the capitol, all those quiet, bloodless deaths. since then,
there’s usually been wood to make fires.
“yes, there’s usually some,” i say.
“katniss, it’s just hunting. you’re the best hunter i know,”
says gale.
“it’s not just hunting. they’re armed. they think,” i say.
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“so do you. and you’ve had more practice. real practice,”
he says. “you know how to kill.”
“not people,” i say.
“how different can it be, really?” says gale grimly.
the awful thing is that if i can forget they’re people, it will
be no different at all.
the peacekeepers are back too soon and gale asks for more
time, but they’re taking him away and i start to panic. “don’t
let them starve!” i cry out, clinging to his hand.
“i won’t! you know i won’t! katniss, remember i —” he
says, and they yank us apart and slam the door and i’ll never
know what it was he wanted me to remember.
it’s a short ride from the justice building to the train sta-
tion. i’ve never been in a car before. rarely even ridden in wa-
gons. in the seam, we travel on foot.
i’ve been right not to cry. the station is swarming with re-
porters with their insectlike cameras trained directly on my
face. but i’ve had a lot of practice at wiping my face clean of
emotions and i do this now. i catch a glimpse of myself on the
television screen on the wall that’s airing my arrival live and
feel gratified that i appear almost bored.
peeta mellark, on the other hand, has obviously been crying
and interestingly enough does not seem to be trying to cover
it up. i immediately wonder if this will be his strategy in the
games. to appear weak and frightened, to reassure the other
tributes that he is no competition at all, and then come out
fighting. this worked very well for a girl, johanna mason, from
district 7 a few years back. she seemed like such a sniveling,
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cowardly fool that no one bothered about her until there were
only a handful of contestants left. it turned out she could kill
viciously. pretty clever, the way she played it. but this seems
an odd strategy for peeta mellark because he’s a baker’s son.
all those years of having enough to eat and hauling bread
trays around have made him broad-shouldered and strong. it
will take an awful lot of weeping to convince anyone to over-
look him.
we have to stand for a few minutes in the doorway of the
train while the cameras gobble up our images, then we’re al-
lowed inside and the doors close mercifully behind us. the
train begins to move at once.
the speed initially takes my breath away. of course, i’ve
never been on a train, as travel between the districts is for-
bidden except for officially sanctioned duties. for us, that’s
mainly transporting coal. but this is no ordinary coal train. it’s
one of the high-speed capitol models that average 250 miles
per hour. our journey to the capitol will take less than a day.
in school, they tell us the capitol was built in a place once
called the rockies. district 12 was in a region known is appa-
lachia. even hundreds of years ago, they mined coal here.
which is why our miners have to dig so deep.
somehow it all comes back to coal at school. besides basic
reading and math most of our instruction is coal-related. ex-
cept for the weekly lecture on the history of panem. it’s most-
ly a lot of blather about what we owe the capitol. i know there
must be more than they’re telling us, an actual account of
what happened during the rebellion. but i don’t spend much
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time thinking about it. whatever the truth is, i don’t see how it
will help me get food on the table.
the tribute train is fancier than even the room in the jus-
tice building. we are each given our own chambers that have
a bedroom, a dressing area, and a private bathroom with hot
and cold running water. we don’t have hot water at home, un-
less we boil it.
there are drawers filled with fine clothes, and effie trinket
tells me to do anything i want, wear anything i want, every-
thing is at my disposal. just be ready for supper in an hour. i
peel off my mother’s blue dress and take a hot shower. i’ve
never had a shower before. it’s like being in a summer rain,
only warmer. i dress in a dark green shirt and pants.
at the last minute, i remember madge’s little gold pin. for
the first time, i get a good look at it. it’s as if someone fa-
shioned a small golden bird and then attached a ring around
it. the bird is connected to the ring only by its wing tips. i
suddenly recognize it. a mockingjay.
they’re funny birds and something of a slap in the face to
the capitol. during the rebellion, the capitol bred a series of
genetically altered animals as weapons. the common term for
them was muttations, or sometimes mutts for short. one was a
special bird called a jabberjay that had the ability to memorize
and repeat whole human conversations. they were homing
birds, exclusively male, that were released into regions where
the capitol’s enemies were known to be hiding. after the birds
gathered words, they’d fly back to centers to be recorded. it
took people awhile to realize what was going on in the dis-
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tricts, how private conversations were being transmitted.
then, of course, the rebels fed the capitol endless lies, and the
joke was on it. so the centers were shut down and the birds
were abandoned to die off in the wild.
only they didn’t die off. instead, the jabberjays mated with
female mockingbirds creating a whole new species that could
replicate both bird whistles and human melodies. they had
lost the ability to enunciate words but could still mimic a
range of human vocal sounds, from a child’s high-pitched
warble to a man’s deep tones. and they could re-create songs.
not just a few notes, but whole songs with multiple verses, if
you had the patience to sing them and if they liked your voice.
my father was particularly fond of mockingjays. when we
went hunting, he would whistle or sing complicated songs to
them and, after a polite pause, they’d always sing back. not
everyone is treated with such respect. but whenever my fa-
ther sang, all the birds in the area would fall silent and listen.
his voice was that beautiful, high and clear and so filled with
life it made you want to laugh and cry at the same time. i could
never bring myself to continue the practice after he was gone.
still, there’s something comforting about the little bird. it’s
like having a piece of my father with me, protecting me. i fas-
ten the pin onto my shirt, and with the dark green fabric as a
background, i can almost imagine the mockingjay flying
through the trees.
effie trinket comes to collect me for supper. i follow her
through the narrow, rocking corridor into a dining room with
polished paneled walls. there’s a table where all the dishes
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are highly breakable. peeta mellark sits waiting for us, the
chair next to him empty.
“where’s haymitch?”