I can still do this

chapter 6

Morality was never a big concern for me. It rated somewhere between music and makeup on my list of important things to know. But now, sitting here with the girl from twelve, it suddenly matters a lot. She views things in those terms; good and evil, right and wrong. Foreign concepts that I'm trying to unravel for the first time in my life.

I don't know how I got here: in a windowsill in the middle of the night, holding Katniss against me. Logically, maybe I do, but I still don't understand. I have to kill her, kill or be killed. There's no room for moments like these, quiet moments where she cries and I comfort her. At least, that's what they told us. But I'm starting to think they lied.

All of my moral confusion can't be traced straight back to any one point. It was more of a gradual descent into these surreal circumstances. I thought I understood why she kept me alive at first; to torture me, use me to get her own unique, television-worthy victory. I almost respected her for that; it's what I would've done.

But then she kept not killing me. She fed me, gave me water. She didn't even torture me. I kept preparing myself for when she'd inevitably snap, break the nice-girl act for the cameras, and start cutting me up, starving me, beating me. I was prepared to wait that all out, try to conserve my strength, and escape when she made her first mistake. But that never happened. I got infected first.

There was so many painful injuries on my body that I hadn't been able to separate the individual strands of agony. By the time I realized the claw marks from the dogs were hot and puffy with infection, it was too late. Wasn't like I'd be able to do anything about it. I was going to die there, alone on the ground, and I hated it. She'd win and all of this would've been pointless.

She came back just in time, and then she saved me. That was the first thing she did that caught me so off-guard. When infection had done most of the work, when she was so close to being the victor, she saved me, putting herself in danger. I couldn't believe it, that she'd do something so utterly stupid just because it was the "right" thing to do.

Before, I might've been able to justify it, calling her simple-minded or bad at playing the game. But obviously, those things didn't apply. And she was so kind to me when she healed me. I passed out partway through, but what I can remember of her hands on me was gentle, scared. And I woke up with my head in her lap.

That's the first time she suggested that ridiculous plan of hers, where both of us would survive. And I didn't even have the energy to say the things I should've; that she was stupid, naïve, childish, that she didn't understand how it works, that she could take her deal and shove it up her ass, because I wouldn't take it in a million years. That last one was what I especially should've said, yet especially didn't.

She surprised me again, when she gave me one of the squirrels. It seemed she didn't understand basic hostage-taking protocol, but I wasn't going to argue. More strength to kill her with later, I guess. But the longer I told myself that's what was going to happen, the less I actually believed it.

I tried to figure out a plan while she was gone. I needed to be confident to win this. But then the floor gave out beneath me and the cave started flooding. Immediately, I knew the Gamemakers did this. They wanted her to win. Everybody did. But I wasn't going to die so easily; before the water got to me, I held myself up, filled my lungs to the max and held my breath. And then the water swirled into the hole, covering me.

I tried to keep myself from panicking. That's one thing they'd taught me to do that actually was coming in handy. I held my breath, kept my eyes shut, and tried to reach for the walls of the whole, something steady that I could use to haul myself up to grab another breath, but there was nothing except swirling, freezing water. They'd trained us for this, how to survive in the water, but it hadn't been anything like this torrential whirlpool. I was panicking then, running out of air, because I was going to die. She could never get back in time.