Catching Fire (The Hunger Games #2)(84)

Vines cut into my face and arms, creepers grab my feet. But I am getting closer to her. Closer. Very close now. Sweat pours down my face, stinging the healing acid wounds. I pant, trying to get some use out of the warm, moist air that seems empty of oxygen. Prim makes a sound - such a lost, irretrievable sound - that I can't even imagine what they have done to evoke it.

"Prim!" I rip through a wall of green into a small clearing and the sound repeats directly above me. Above me? My head whips back. Do they have her up in the trees? I desperately search the branches but see nothing. "Prim?" I say pleadingly. I hear her but can't see her. Her next wail rings out, clear as a bell, and there's no mistaking the source. It's coming from the mouth of a small, crested black bird perched on a branch about ten feet over my head. And then I understand.

It's a jabberjay.

I've never seen one before - I thought they no longer existed - and for a moment, as I lean against the trunk of the tree, clutching the stitch in my side, I examine it. The muttation, the forerunner, the father. I pull up a mental image of a mockingbird, fuse it with the jabberjay, and yes, I can see how they mated to make my mockingjay. There is nothing about the bird that suggests it's a mutt. Nothing except the horribly lifelike sounds of Prim's voice streaming from its mouth. I silence it with an arrow in its throat. The bird falls to the ground. I remove my arrow and wring its neck for good measure. Then I hurl the revolting thing into the jungle. No degree of hunger would ever tempt me to eat it.

It wasn't real, I tell myself. The same way the muttation wolves last year weren't really the dead tributes. It's just a sadistic trick of the Gamemakers.

Finnick crashes into the clearing to find me wiping my arrow clean with some moss. "Katniss?"

"It's okay. I'm okay," I say, although I don't feel okay at all. "I thought I heard my sister but - " The piercing shriek cuts me off. It's another voice, not Prim's, maybe a young woman's. I don't recognize it. But the effect on Finnick is instantaneous. The color vanishes from his face and I can actually see his pupils dilate in fear. "Finnick, wait!" I say, reaching out to reassure him, but he's bolted away. Gone off in pursuit of the victim, as mindlessly as I pursued Prim. "Finnick!" I call, but I know he won't turn back and wait for me to give a rational explanation. So all I can do is follow him.

It's no effort to track him, even though he's moving so fast, since he leaves a clear, trampled path in his wake. But the bird is at least a quarter mile away, most of it uphill, and by the time I reach him, I'm winded. He's circling around a giant tree. The trunk must be four feet in diameter and the limbs don't even begin until twenty feet up. The woman's shrieks emanate from somewhere in the foliage, but the jabberjay's concealed. Finnick's screaming as well, over and over. "Annie! Annie!" He's in a state of panic and completely unreachable, so I do what I would do anyway. I scale an adjacent tree, locate the jabberjay, and take it out with an arrow. It falls straight down, landing right at Finnick's feet. He picks it up, slowly making the connection, but when I slide down to join him, he looks more despairing than ever.

"It's all right, Finnick. It's just a jabberjay. They're playing a trick on us," I say. "It's not real. It's not your ... Annie."

"No, it's not Annie. But the voice was hers. Jabberjays mimic what they hear. Where did they get those screams, Katniss?" he says.

I can feel my own cheeks grow pale as I understand his meaning. "Oh, Finnick, you don't think they ..."

"Yes. I do. That's exactly what I think," he says.

I have an image of Prim in a white room, strapped to a table, while masked, robed figures elicit those sounds from her. Somewhere they are torturing her, or did torture her, to get those sounds. My knees turn to water and I sink to the ground. Finnick is trying to tell me something, but I can't hear him. What I do finally hear is another bird starting up somewhere off to my left. And this time, the voice is Gale's.

Finnick catches my arm before I can run. "No. It's not him." He starts pulling me downhill, toward the beach. "We're getting out of here!" But Gale's voice is so full of pain I can't help struggling to reach it. "It's not him, Katniss! It's a mutt!" Finnick shouts at me. "Come on!" He moves me along, half dragging, half carrying me, until I can process what he said. He's right, it's just another jabberjay. I can't help Gale by chasing it down. But that doesn't change the fact that it is Gale's voice, and somewhere, sometime, someone has made him sound like this.

I stop fighting Finnick, though, and like the night in the fog, I flee what I can't fight. What can only do me harm. Only this time it's my heart and not my body that's disintegrating. This must be another weapon of the clock. Four o'clock, I guess. When the hands tick-tock onto the four, the monkeys go home and the jabberjays come out to play. Finnick is right - getting out of here is the only thing to do. Although there will be nothing Haymitch can send in a parachute that will help either Finnick or me recover from the wounds the birds have inflicted.

I catch sight of Peeta and Johanna standing at the tree line and I'm filled with a mixture of relief and anger. Why didn't Peeta come to help me? Why did no one come after us? Even now he hangs back, his hands raised, palms toward us, lips moving but no words reaching us. Why?,