PART ONE: THE ASHES

CHAPTER ONE

It starts with a drill.

My body has become used to that drill and what follows after it. At the first high-pitched noise, my skin starts to cover itself in goosebumps, raw and numb. My muscles tighten, reflectively, waiting.

Within a few seconds, they come in. People dressed in all white. I'd call them Peacekeepers except they don't act like them. They're bad doctors, I think to myself. The first thing they do is flatten my arm, which is already strapped down to the table along with the rest of my limbs. Then they inject a thick needle into a prominent vein.

Then my day begins.

I see distorted images, flashing and broken, flickering and wrong. They're of everything. The Games, Katniss, my family, my district. But mostly, it focuses on Katniss.

I'd see her face at first. It always started with her face. Her high and prominent cheekbones, the dark brown almost black hair tightly tied into that braid she always wore. Her olive skin that tanned so easily, her green eyes, bright like leaves on trees.

At the first injection, the day after I came here, I was glad to see her face. I was happy for whatever it was they were pumping into me, because it was a break from the monotonous four walls I'd already become tired of. The place where they'd leave me all day was nothing other than a small box with dreadful marks across the wall that I didn't want to think what they were. I spent all day looking at the ceiling of the room, unable to get up or move even a few inches. Each of my fingers were even strapped down to the metal bed, tied down by thin leather straps. I would pull against them, spending my pent up energy, but it was useless. I was weak and becoming malnourished.

They'd feed me, of course. But not enough, never enough. Through tubes and without utensils, barely able to swallow if I ever got the chance to. I felt thirsty despite the water they dripped through me. My throat and tongue felt dry and hoarse. It made my head hurt, brain banging against the bones of my skull. Bathroom breaks were scarce, too. I couldn't count the days or the hours very well in my shut-off, dark room, but I knew it was embarrassing how many times I'd soiled myself already. And forget showers, too. There were no rose-scented gels or steam dryers in this place. It was cold water hosing you down if you got too messy, or if you risked becoming ill at how dirty you became.

You felt guilty for that, even. For cold waters and food that would drip through you. The way that the bad doctors would look at you, as if you were taking something so precious and expensive from them. Like you weren't worth even the most basic of human needs.

So, of course seeing Katniss was nice. The painful injections that brought her to me were nothing. I knew that nothing I was seeing was real, because seeing Katniss was too good. Even when the illusions turned sour, it felt too good.

They started with trying to kill her. The images would show me her, beautiful and full, happy and glowing. I'd glow, too, I was sure of it. But then her face would distort, fear seeping through her pores and changing her expression.

One day, she'd just be murdered. Straight gone. She'd be there, smiling, touching me. Then she'd be gone. Blood draining from her now-corpse, smile deadened flat and eyes that lost the shine they once held so easily.

Another day, she'd be tortured. It would be slow and brutal, and she'd scream my name. She'd ask why I wasn't helping her, but I never could. In those days, I could feel reality kick in, my body pushing against the straps that held me down, my own voice screaming out her name. But she'd always look at me, as if I could be doing more. As if I should be. Condemning me, judging me, for leaving her there, being hurt by a mysterious force beyond either of our controls.

I'd grown used to everything about these illusions. It always felt the same and I had to repeat mantras to myself to keep calm and sane afterwards. That I was alive, clearly.

In what could only be described as a cell, I'd had plenty of time to think. I had gone over President Snow's words to me. Do you know... Do you know what that girl has done...

Did I? Did I know?

What? What had she done?

I'll find out...

Find? Find out what?

My questions always trailed, unanswered. But I'd realised that she must be alive. That I wasn't the Victor. That somehow, some of us had survived. I had no idea how many, but some of us had. If I was the Victor, I'd be out there right now, smiling and waving at Capitol crowds with a crown on my head, wanting to die on the inside, knowing that Katniss was dead.

What confirmed to me that I wasn't the only one alive was the screaming. The now-familiar noise of Johanna Masons' screams, muffled through the wall near my head.

They'd go off like clockwork. My drill would happen, the bad doctors would come in. I'd hear her screaming. I'd get injected. I'd be out for the count, subdued by hallucinations and images that rolled underneath my eyelids like movie frames. I'd be back up at around midday, I'd estimate, and it would be silent. I'd get some food dripped into me. Water. I'd hear screaming and I'd get another injection. Later on, a few hours at least, I'd come out of it again, rising from the blackness of the end of my injection nightmares. More food dripping into me, more water. I'd get a toilet break and a hose down if I hadn't been able to hold it in.

After a little while, though, the injections changed. Katniss was no longer being killed, she was being... awful. She wasn't the Katniss I knew.

She was a mutt.