A Knife in the Dark | ✓

Fifty Five

A few months passed, though it could have been weeks. Time was a lost concept to me; I understood minutes and hours, not weeks and months. I learned from rumor of experiments being done in the Capitol. And I was frightened.

"Is it true?" I asked Sparks one day after my isolation period was over.

"Some of it." He replied quietly. Ace and Riggs were sparring. They were evenly matched, and I noticed something: Ace moved fluidly like he'd been raised to fight, but he moved just a little faster than anyone I'd ever seen. And Riggs...I couldn't quite figure out what was off about his movements. There was something almost mechanical about his movements, but I was almost sure that that wasn't it--or maybe it was. Were his movements mechanical? Or was I just so accustomed to analyzing the way people moved in combat that I couldn't tell the difference between fluid and mechanical? Maybe I was wrong, or I was going crazy, or maybe I was just too used to looking at people like they were machines.

That was it, I thought--I'd spent so long viewing people from the sidelines that I viewed them as patterns and machines, not people. Riggs did not move mechanically. I was imagining it.

The door opened and then clanged shut. Footsteps echoed through the training room, but Ace and Riggs kept going while Sparks and I continued to watch. Ace grabbed Riggs's arm and twisted, knocking him to the ground. Riggs, using Ace's grip on him, flipped Ace over his shoulders and forced him onto his back. Ace, despite just having the wind knocked out of him, laughed.

A man stood beside me. It was Plutarch. I said nothing to him.

Riggs stood and pulled Ace to his feet. I wasn't sure how, because neither of them had been facing him, but I thought that perhaps they had noticed that Plutarch had entered. They turned to look at him, and so did Sparks and I.

Plutarch smiled. "I see you all are doing well."

"You told me you had news, Plutarch." Sparks said. "I'd like to hear it."

"Right." Plutarch nodded. He didn't look as happy as he had a moment before. "The Capitol had a few Victors, and I'm sure you all know by now that our raid was successful."

We all nodded. Of course we did. It was all anyone had been talking about for a while.

"Is it time?" Sparks asked.

"We don't have a choice," Plutarch replied. "We've tried being diplomatic, but it isn't working. They won't join us, and we need them."

"Killing them isn't the way to do it." Ace said. "Everyone's been saying that."

I knew what they were talking about, even if they were carefully talking around it. "You're going to launch an attack against District Two." I said.

"Yes, they are." Ace said. He wasn't looking away from Plutarch. "I'm not participating. I won't stand behind the senseless slaughter of innocent people."

"You'll do what you're told, Ace." Plutarch said stiffly. "You forget that you are merely a soldier."

Ace looked angry, but he said nothing in reply. I realized that Riggs was doing something to restrain him, but I couldn't see what.

"It's the worst idea I've heard yet." I told Plutarch. "You're all idiots for trying. District Two is full of soldiers. If the Peacekeepers fall, the trainees will stand and fight. They train to kill and are prepared to die. You're a bunch of sheep walking into a den filled with hungry lions."

"They aren't planning on going in to fight." Ace said hotly. He was still looking at Plutarch. "Why don't you tell her how cowardly this resistance is?"

Plutarch said nothing. It was Riggs that spoke. "They're planning on bombing that mountain that they mine. The large one."

It took a moment for the meaning of his words to sink in. When they did, my face felt hot. Then my neck. Then my chest. The heat spread to my arms, my stomach, my legs, until I was consumed by it.

My head was filled with the spring, the summer, and the fall--Cato and Jake, leaving the quarry to eat lunch with Clove, Saylee, and I after spending the day helping. The men that joked around with them, the boys my age that exited the tunnels every evening with soot staining their faces. Midwinter, and my father coming home after being trapped for two weeks in a collapsed part of the mountain, telling my mother with haunted eyes what it was like, trapped in the darkness. They thought I wasn't listening. Some of the boys from training approaching me and Saylee and Clove and begging us to help them bandage their hands, cut open and bleeding and nearly infected from the dirt. The men, with haunted eyes and cracked and bleeding hands, who always greeted their children with smiles and hugs and little bits of pretty rock that they'd found in the caves.

I was angry. Angry because I knew those people, and they were good people. Angry because they couldn't fight back. Angry because they would suffer as they died. Angry because I knew that it was like to have parents taken away, and I knew that so many of those children that I had willingly taken tessarae for would be orphaned. I knew the parents that didn't work in the caves, how happy and in love most of them were; they would be widows. Angry because that could have been my husband, had my parents not died. That could have been my life. That could have been Cato, if he could've had his way.

The anger was the kind that struck me speechless. I could only stare mutely at Plutarch as he continued to explain what our roles would be in the whole ordeal, but I couldn't listen. I would not do that. Images of the dead bodies of Cato and Clove appeared in my head. And then there were other images alongside them: Saylee, Jake, Bell, Leah, Lucius, Lars, and Tiberius, all dead. Flora, Vitellia, Maximus dead as well. And Jake, Saylee, Clove, and Cato's parents, all dead.

Plutarch left before I was able to say something. Sparks shook his head and left, following him to perhaps talk sense into him. Riggs and Ace came straight for me, and Riggs caught me just as my legs gave out. He lowered me to the floor gently, and the three of us sat together on the cold floor.

"I want a way out." I said. "I can't go there. I can't do that. I won't." Anyone I raised my gun to would be my father, my mother, my adoptive parents, my friends, my classmates, the people I trained, the people I helped, the people I knew. I couldn't do that. I couldn't. I would kill myself before I would kill any of them.

"There is no way out." Ace said.

"There is." Riggs said. "But you won't like it."

✗

Riggs hadn't been wrong; I hadn't liked his way out. It was why I was lying in a hospital bed while he and Ace were flying out to District Two with everyone else, and why Katniss Everdeen's mother was shaking her head as she checked my vitals.

"Well, this is certainly the most creative way I've seen to get out of going to fight." She said. "A concussion and a fractured arm. You must've really not wanted to go."

"What are you talking about?" I replied, feigning innocence. "This wasn't expected nor was it planned."

I was half-lying. It wasn't expected by me, nor did I plan it. But Riggs had been very aware of what he was doing, which was why he didn't completely snap my arm in half. His control was admirable, at least. Thankfully, the blow that knocked me unconscious and gave me a concussion came quickly after the broken arm, and when I woke up I was on pain meds. I couldn't even recall the pain.

She smiled like she could see right through me. "Of course it wasn't."