Mockingjay

watching, but by the look of misery on his face, long enough to see what happened on the street. How he went mad, tried to bash my head in, and hurled Mitchell into the pod. He painfully pushes himself up to a sitting position and directs his words to Gale.
    “Our next move . . . is to kill me.”

That makes two requests for Peeta’s death in less than an hour.
    “Don’t be ridiculous,” says Jackson.
    “I just murdered a member of our squad!” shouts Peeta.
    “You pushed him off you. You couldn’t have known he would trigger the net at that exact spot,” says Finnick, trying to calm him.
    “Who cares? He’s dead, isn’t he?” Tears begin to run down Peeta’s face. “I didn’t know. I’ve never seen myself like that before. Katniss is right. I’m the monster. I’m the mutt. I’m the one Snow has turned into a weapon!”
    “It’s not your fault, Peeta,” says Finnick.
    “You can’t take me with you. It’s only a matter of time before I kill someone else.” Peeta looks around at our conflicted faces. “Maybe you think it’s kinder to just dump me somewhere. Let me take my chances. But that’s the same thing as handing me over to the Capitol. Do you think you’d be doing me a favor by sending me back to Snow?”
    Peeta. Back in Snow’s hands. Tortured and tormented until no bits of his former self will ever emerge again.
    For some reason, the last stanza to “The Hanging Tree” starts running through my head. The one where the man wants his lover dead rather than have her face the evil that awaits her in the world.
     
    Are you, are you
    Coming to the tree
    Wear a necklace of rope, side by side with me.
    Strange things did happen here
    No stranger would it be
    If we met up at midnight in the hanging tree.
     
    “I’ll kill you before that happens,” says Gale. “I promise.”
    Peeta hesitates, as if considering the reliability of this offer, and then shakes his head. “It’s no good. What if you’re not there to do it? I want one of those poison pills like the rest of you have.”
    Nightlock. There’s one pill back at camp, in its special slot on the sleeve of my Mockingjay suit. But there’s another in the breast pocket of my uniform. Interesting that they didn’t issue one to Peeta. Perhaps Coin thought he might take it before he had the opportunity to kill me. It’s unclear if Peeta means he’d finish himself off now, to spare us having to murder him, or only if the Capitol took him prisoner again. In the state he’s in, I expect it would be sooner rather than later. It would certainly make things easier on the rest of us. Not to have to shoot him. It would certainly simplify the problem of dealing with his homicidal episodes.
    I don’t know if it’s the pods, or the fear, or watching Boggs die, but I feel the arena all around me. It’s as if I’ve never left, really. Once again I’m battling not only for my own survival but for Peeta’s as well. How satisfying, how entertaining it would be for Snow to have me kill him. To have Peeta’s death on my conscience for whatever is left of my life.
    “It’s not about you,” I say. “We’re on a mission. And you’re necessary to it.” I look to the rest of the group. “Think we might find some food here?”
    Besides the medical kit and cameras, we have nothing but our uniforms and our weapons.
    Half of us stay to guard Peeta or keep an eye out for Snow’s broadcast, while the others hunt for something to eat. Messalla proves most valuable because he lived in a near replica of this apartment and knows where people would be most likely to stash food. Like how there’s a storage space concealed by a mirrored panel in the bedroom, or how easy it is to pop out the ventilation screen in the hallway. So even though the kitchen cupboards are bare, we find over thirty canned goods and several boxes of cookies.
    The hoarding disgusts the soldiers raised in 13. “Isn’t this illegal?” says Leeg 1.
    “On the contrary, in the Capitol you’d be considered stupid not to do it,” says Messalla. “Even before the Quarter Quell, people were starting to stock up on scarce supplies.”
    “While others went without,” says Leeg 1.
    “Right,” says Messalla. “That’s how it works here.”
    “Fortunately, or we wouldn’t have dinner,” says Gale. “Everybody grab a can.”
    Some of our company seem reluctant to do this, but it’s as good a method as any. I’m really not in the mood to divvy up everything into