Mockingjay

closet hangs my father’s hunting jacket. Before the Quell, I brought it here from the old house, thinking its presence might be of comfort to my mother and sister when I was dead. Thank goodness, or it’d be ash now.
    The soft leather feels soothing and for a moment I’m calmed by the memories of the hours spent wrapped in it. Then, inexplicably, my palms begin to sweat. A strange sensation creeps up the back of my neck. I whip around to face the room and find it empty. Tidy. Everything in its place. There was no sound to alarm me. What, then?
    My nose twitches. It’s the smell. Cloying and artificial. A dab of white peeks out of a vase of dried flowers on my dresser. I approach it with cautious steps. There, all but obscured by its preserved cousins, is a fresh white rose. Perfect. Down to the last thorn and silken petal.
    And I know immediately who’s sent it to me.
    President Snow.
    When I begin to gag at the stench, I back away and clear out. How long has it been here? A day? An hour? The rebels did a security sweep of the Victor’s Village before I was cleared to come here, checking for explosives, bugs, anything unusual. But perhaps the rose didn’t seem noteworthy to them. Only to me.
    Downstairs, I snag the game bag off the chair, bouncing it along the floor until I remember it’s occupied. On the lawn, I frantically signal to the hovercraft while Buttercup thrashes. I jab him with my elbow, but this only infuriates him. A hovercraft materializes and a ladder drops down. I step on and the current freezes me until I’m lifted on board.
    Gale helps me from the ladder. “You all right?”
    “Yeah,” I say, wiping the sweat off my face with my sleeve.
    He left me a rose! I want to scream, but it’s not information I’m sure I should share with someone like Plutarch looking on. First of all, because it will make me sound crazy. Like I either imagined it, which is quite possible, or I’m overreacting, which will buy me a trip back to the drug-induced dreamland I’m trying so hard to escape. No one will fully understand — how it’s not just a flower, not even just President Snow’s flower, but a promise of revenge — because no one else sat in the study with him when he threatened me before the Victory Tour.
    Positioned on my dresser, that white-as-snow rose is a personal message to me. It speaks of unfinished business. It whispers,

I can find you. I can reach you. Perhaps I am watching you now.

Are there Capitol hoverplanes speeding in to blow us out of the sky? As we travel over District 12, I watch anxiously for signs of an attack, but nothing pursues us. After several minutes, when I hear an exchange between Plutarch and the pilot confirming that the airspace is clear, I begin to relax a little.
    Gale nods at the howls coming from my game bag. “Now I know why you had to go back.”
    “If there was even a chance of his recovery.” I dump the bag onto a seat, where the loathsome creature begins a low, deep-throated growl. “Oh, shut up,” I tell the bag as I sink into the cushioned window seat across from it.
    Gale sits next to me. “Pretty bad down there?”
    “Couldn’t be much worse,” I answer. I look in his eyes and see my own grief reflected there. Our hands find each other, holding fast to a part of 12 that Snow has somehow failed to destroy. We sit in silence for the rest of the trip to 13, which only takes about forty-five minutes. A mere week’s journey on foot. Bonnie and Twill, the District 8 refugees who I encountered in the woods last winter, weren’t so far from their destination after all. They apparently didn’t make it, though. When I asked about them in 13, no one seemed to know who I was talking about. Died in the woods, I guess.
    From the air, 13 looks about as cheerful as 12. The rubble isn’t smoking, the way the Capitol shows it on television, but there’s next to no life aboveground. In the seventy-five years since the Dark Days — when 13 was said to have been obliterated in the war between the Capitol and the districts — almost all new construction has been beneath the earth’s surface. There was already a substantial underground facility here, developed over centuries to be either a clandestine refuge for government leaders in time of war or a last resort for humanity if life above became unlivable. Most important for the people of 13, it was the center of the Capitol’s nuclear weapons development program. During the Dark Days, the rebels in