Catching Fire

phrase. “Tick, tock.”
    “Tick, tock,” I agree softly. “It’s time for bed. Tick, tock. Go to sleep.”
    The sun rises in the sky until it’s directly over us. It must be noon, I think absently. Not that it matters. Across the water, off to the right, I see the enormous flash as the lightning bolt hits the tree and the electrical storm begins again. Right in the same area it did last night. Someone must have moved into its range, triggered the attack. I sit for a while watching the lightning, keeping Wiress calm, lulled into a sort of peacefulness by the lapping of the water. I think of last night, how the lightning began just after the bell tolled. Twelve bongs.
    “Tick, tock,” Wiress says, surfacing to consciousness for a moment and then going back under.
    Twelve bongs last night. Like it was midnight. Then lightning. The sun overhead now. Like it’s noon. And lightning.
    Slowly I rise up and survey the arena. The lightning there. In the next pie wedge over came the blood rain, where Johanna, Wiress, and Beetee were caught. We would have been in the third section, right next to that, when the fog appeared. And as soon as it was sucked away, the monkeys began to gather in the fourth. Tick, tock. My head snaps to the other side. A couple of hours ago, at around ten, that wave came out of the second section to the left of where the lightning strikes now. At noon. At midnight. At noon.
    “Tick, tock,” Wiress says in her sleep. As the lightning ceases and the blood rain begins just to the right of it, her words suddenly make sense.
    “Oh,” I say under my breath. “Tick, tock.” My eyes sweep around the full circle of the arena and I know she’s right. “Tick, tock. This is a clock.”

A clock. I can almost see the hands ticking around the twelve-sectioned face of the arena. Each hour begins a new horror, a new Gamemaker weapon, and ends the previous. Lightning, blood rain, fog, monkeys — those are the first four hours on the clock. And at ten, the wave. I don’t know what happens in the other seven, but I know Wiress is right.
    At present, the blood rain’s falling and we’re on the beach below the monkey segment, far too close to the fog for my liking. Do the various attacks stay within the confines of the jungle? Not necessarily. The wave didn’t. If that fog leaches out of the jungle, or the monkeys return . . .
    “Get up,” I order, shaking Peeta and Finnick and Johanna awake. “Get up — we have to move.” There’s enough time, though, to explain the clock theory to them. About Wiress’s tick-tocking and how the movements of the invisible hands trigger a deadly force in each section.
    I think I’ve convinced everyone who’s conscious except Johanna, who’s naturally opposed to liking anything I suggest. But even she agrees it’s better to be safe than sorry.
    While the others collect our few possessions and get Beetee back into his jumpsuit, I rouse Wiress. She awakes with a panicked “tick, tock!”
    “Yes, tick, tock, the arena’s a clock. It’s a clock, Wiress, you were right,” I say. “You were right.”
    Relief floods her face — I guess because somebody has finally understood what she’s known probably from the first tolling of the bells. “Midnight.”
    “It starts at midnight,” I confirm.
    A memory struggles to surface in my brain. I see a clock. No, it’s a watch, resting in Plutarch Heavensbee’s palm. “It starts at midnight,” Plutarch said. And then my mockingjay lit up briefly and vanished. In retrospect, it’s like he was giving me a clue about the arena. But why would he? At the time, I was no more a tribute in these Games than he was. Maybe he thought it would help me as a mentor. Or maybe this had been the plan all along.
    Wiress nods at the blood rain. “One-thirty,” she says.
    “Exactly. One-thirty. And at two, a terrible poisonous fog begins there,” I say, pointing at the nearby jungle. “So we have to move somewhere safe now.” She smiles and stands up obediently. “Are you thirsty?” I hand her the woven bowl and she gulps down about a quart. Finnick gives her the last bit of bread and she gnaws on it. With the inability to communicate overcome, she’s functioning again.
    I check my weapons. Tie up the spile and the tube of medicine in the parachute and fix it to my belt with vine.
    Beetee’s still pretty out of it, but when Peeta tries to lift him, he objects. “Wire,” he says.
    “She’s right here,” Peeta tells