Catching Fire

want him to go. In fact, I want him to climb in with me, to be there when the nightmares hit tonight. For some reason that I can’t quite form, I know I’m not allowed to ask that.
    “Don’t go yet. Not until I fall asleep,” I say.
    Peeta sits on the side of the bed, warming my hand in both of his. “Almost thought you’d changed your mind today. When you were late for dinner.”
    I’m foggy but I can guess what he means. With the fence going on and me showing up late and the Peacekeepers waiting, he thought I’d made a run for it, maybe with Gale.
    “No, I’d have told you,” I say. I pull his hand up and lean my cheek against the back of it, taking in the faint scent of cinnamon and dill from the breads he must have baked today. I want to tell him about Twill and Bonnie and the uprising and the fantasy of District 13, but it’s not safe to and I can feel myself slipping away, so I just get out one more sentence. “Stay with me.”
    As the tendrils of sleep syrup pull me down, I hear him whisper a word back, but I don’t quite catch it.
    My mother lets me sleep until noon, then rouses me to examine my heel. I’m ordered to a week of bed rest and I don’t object because I feel so lousy. Not just my heel and my tailbone. My whole body aches with exhaustion. So I let my mother doctor me and feed me breakfast in bed and tuck another quilt around me. Then I just lie there, staring out my window at the winter sky, pondering how on earth this will all turn out. I think a lot about Bonnie and Twill, and the pile of white wedding dresses downstairs, and if Thread will figure out how I got back in and arrest me. It’s funny, because he could just arrest me, anyway, based on past crimes, but maybe he has to have something really irrefutable to do it, now that I’m a victor. And I wonder if President Snow’s in contact with Thread. I think it’s unlikely he ever acknowledged that old Cray existed, but now that I’m such a nationwide problem, is he carefully instructing Thread what to do? Or is Thread acting on his own? At any rate, I’m sure they’d both agree on keeping me locked up here inside the district with that fence. Even if I could figure out some way to escape — maybe get a rope up to that maple tree branch and climb out — there’d be no escaping with my family and friends now. I told Gale I would stay and fight, anyway.
    For the next few days, I jump every time there’s a knock on the door. No Peacekeepers show up to arrest me, though, so eventually I begin to relax. I’m further reassured when Peeta casually tells me the power is off in sections of the fence because crews are out securing the base of the chain link to the ground. Thread must believe I somehow got under the thing, even with that deadly current running through it. It’s a break for the district, having the Peacekeepers busy doing something besides abusing people.
    Peeta comes by every day to bring me cheese buns and begins to help me work on the family book. It’s an old thing, made of parchment and leather. Some herbalist on my mother’s side of the family started it ages ago. The book’s composed of page after page of ink drawings of plants with descriptions of their medical uses. My father added a section on edible plants that was my guidebook to keeping us alive after his death. For a long time, I’ve wanted to record my own knowledge in it. Things I learned from experience or from Gale, and then the information I picked up when I was training for the Games. I didn’t because I’m no artist and it’s so crucial that the pictures are drawn in exact detail. That’s where Peeta comes in. Some of the plants he knows already, others we have dried samples of, and others I have to describe. He makes sketches on scrap paper until I’m satisfied they’re right, then I let him draw them in the book. After that, I carefully print all I know about the plant.
    It’s quiet, absorbing work that helps take my mind off my troubles. I like to watch his hands as he works, making a blank page bloom with strokes of ink, adding touches of color to our previously black and yellowish book. His face takes on a special look when he concentrates. His usual easy expression is replaced by something more intense and removed that suggests an entire world locked away inside him. I’ve seen flashes of this before: in the arena, or when he speaks to a crowd, or that time he shoved the Peacekeepers’ guns away from me in District 11. I