Chapter 16 : The Reunion
"Show me."
Katniss stopped walking and turned, her bow held loose but ready. The morning light caught the weapon's curve—sleek, deadly, definitely from the Cornucopia's premium cache. She'd risked more than Haymitch had advised and come away with the one thing that made her dangerous.
"Show you what?"
"Your arm." She nodded toward the bloodstains on my jacket. "You were bleeding yesterday. I saw it from the platform—you tackled someone, got cut. That kind of wound doesn't just disappear."
I pushed up my sleeve. The skin underneath was smooth, unmarked, as if no blade had ever touched it. Not even a scar remained.
"I heal fast."
"Nobody heals that fast." Her gray eyes were calculating, hunter's instincts working through the problem. "The tracker injection, maybe? Some kind of Capitol medicine they put in us?"
"Maybe." The lie came easier than it should have. "Or maybe I'm just lucky."
She didn't believe me. I could see it in the set of her jaw, the way her fingers tightened on her bow. But she also didn't press further—survival in the arena required trust, and questioning your only ally too hard could shatter that.
"Fine." She turned back toward the forest. "Keep your secrets. But if something's wrong with you—if you're sick, or the Capitol did something—"
"I'll tell you. If it matters."
Another lie. But one I could live with.
We found a stream around midday.
The water ran clear over mossy stones, cold enough to numb fingers. My Blind Spot sense registered minimal observation in this area—cameras existed but attention was elsewhere, probably focused on the Career pack hunting more interesting prey.
Katniss knelt at the water's edge, filling her single bottle. Her movements were efficient, practiced—the motions of someone who'd gathered water from streams her whole life.
I retrieved a second bottle from storage.
Her head snapped up. "Where was that?"
"I'm good at keeping things on me."
"That wasn't in your hands a second ago."
"Quick hands." I shrugged, hoping the casualness sold. "District 12 skill. You pick up things."
She stared at me for a long moment. Then, deliberately, she looked away. "You're hiding something."
"Probably."
"More than one something."
"Almost certainly."
Her laugh surprised us both—short, sharp, stripped of any real humor. "At least you're honest about being dishonest."
"I find it saves time." I filled the bottle, added a purification tablet. "Whatever I'm hiding, it's not a threat to you. That's the truth. Everything else is just... survival."
"Survival." She tasted the word like it was bitter. "In the parade, you held my hand. Raised it high. Made us partners in front of all of Panem."
"I remember." The fire around us, the crowd's roar, Effie's delighted shriek. A lifetime ago. Eight days, actually.
"Was that real? Or just strategy?"
The question deserved an honest answer. I turned to face her fully, setting the water bottle aside.
"Both. The strategy was real—two volunteers, united front, sponsors love a story. But the rest..." I paused, searching for words that weren't lies. "I volunteered because I was tired of being careful. You volunteered because you love your sister. Neither of us is here by accident. That means something."
"Does it?"
"It means when the Careers come hunting, I won't run. You either, I'm guessing."
She held my gaze. Whatever she was looking for, she found enough of it. "No. I won't run."
"Then we're partners. Everything else is details."
We ate lunch on a fallen log, sharing rations from my mysteriously deep pockets.
Katniss had gone hungry since the bloodbath—surviving on a few crackers and what little water she'd found. Now she devoured dried meat and Capitol bread with single-minded intensity, barely pausing between bites.
I watched her eat and remembered the chocolate cake Haymitch had brought us before the interviews. How Katniss had stress-eaten Capitol bread in the kitchen, silent and scared. How we'd shared the last bite without needing to explain why.
"The Careers will be hunting," she said between mouthfuls. "They saw my score. They know I'm dangerous."
"They don't know about me. That's our advantage."
"The weak volunteer and the girl on fire." Something like appreciation flickered across her face. "You planned that. The low score."
"I planned to be invisible. Getting hunted by four trained killers wasn't my first choice for arena experience."
"So what was?"
"Survive day one. Find you. Figure out the rest from there." I retrieved an apple from storage—I'd stolen it from the Training Center dining hall, felt like a year ago—and split it with my knife. "We made it through day one. Step two is complete. Now we figure out step three."
"Which is?"
"Stay high, stay hidden. Let the Careers and everyone else thin each other out. We hunt, we gather, we move every day. Never sleep in the same place twice." I handed her half the apple. "We survive longer than everyone else. Then we deal with what's left."
Katniss took the apple, turned it in her fingers. "And when it's just us? At the end?"
The question I'd been avoiding since the Reaping stage. I knew the answer—or thought I did, based on memories of a story that might not unfold the same way here—but I couldn't share it.
"We'll figure it out then. Together."
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she bit into the apple, sweet juice running down her chin, and nodded once.
"Partners."
"Partners."
We traveled through the afternoon, my Blind Spot guiding us through gaps in observation.
The cameras tracked everything, but attention was finite. When Gamemakers focused on a Career skirmish or a tribute's desperate flight, other sectors went relatively unwatched. I learned to feel these gaps like currents in water—pressure easing, the sense of being observed flickering rather than constant.
Katniss noticed.
"You always know when to move," she said as we crossed an exposed ridge. "When to stop. It's like you can feel the cameras."
"Instinct. The longer you survive, the sharper it gets."
Not entirely false. My abilities were improving under constant use—range expanding, reactions quickening. Phase One developing toward Phase Two, exactly as the knowledge I'd awakened with had promised.
"My father had instincts like that," Katniss said quietly. "In the mines. He'd know when to get out before the gas built up. Could feel it in his bones, he said."
"Good instincts."
"They weren't good enough." Her voice stayed flat, controlled. "One day they just... weren't."
I didn't ask what happened. Didn't need to. Every child in District 12 knew about mine collapses. About fathers who went underground and never came back.
"I'm sorry."
"It was years ago." She moved ahead, ending the conversation. But the words had done something—opened a crack in the wall between us, let something human through.
Small progress. In an arena designed for killing, small was everything.
By evening, we'd found a defensible position.
A rocky overhang near another water source, sheltered from above and invisible from most angles. Katniss approved the location with a nod—her hunting experience recognizing good ground when she saw it.
We set up minimal camp: sleeping spots marked, escape routes identified, watch schedule agreed. Professional, efficient, like we'd been doing this for weeks instead of hours.
The cannon fired just as the anthem began.
One shot. Another tribute gone. I counted in my head: eleven dead at the bloodbath, plus the District 8 girl whose face I'd seen last night. Twelve dead now. Twelve alive.
The Capitol seal blazed across the sky, and a face appeared. The boy from District 9—one of the forgettable ones, probably killed by Careers during a sweep.
Twelve dead. Twelve alive. Half the game remaining.
Katniss watched the sky until the seal faded, her expression carved from stone.
"That could have been me," she said.
"It wasn't."
"But it could have been."
I had no answer for that. The arithmetic of the Hunger Games was simple and brutal: twenty-three children died so one could live. Every cannon was someone's child, someone's friend, someone's future that would never happen.
My first life, I'd watched horrors on screens and felt nothing but distant discomfort. Now I was inside the screen, and the horror was immediate, personal, impossible to ignore.
"We survive," I said finally. "That's all we can do. We survive, and we remember them."
Katniss didn't respond. But she also didn't move away when I sat beside her, keeping watch as the forest settled into night.
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