How did he think Katniss was going to keep all of this straight? So far, they had only been to Katniss' small apartment, a conference area, and the phone room, and already her head was spinning with all the rules she would be expected to follow. Absolutely no camera use. No zip drives. Never go anywhere without your identification card. Only enter the phone room if the people already inside work on your project.

She understood some of them. Others made Katniss question why she had agreed to come here in the first place.

"Good afternoon!" The greeting reached them mostly as an echo, but there was no missing the warmth behind it.

Finally, someone who wasn't annoyed by her presence – yet. Adam tried to press on, but Katniss stopped and turned towards the voice.

She spotted him at the end of the long corridor. Broad-shouldered, right around her age, nice smile, and looking at her like she was the most interesting thing he'd seen all day. If he hadn't been blond, she might have gotten butterflies. Instead, her stomach twisted in a way that had become all too familiar over the past eighteen years.

"I thought I heard two sets of footsteps. How are you doing, Adam?" Though his words were addressed to Adam, the man's eyes never moved away from Katniss as he moved towards them.

"Fine."

"Glad to hear it. I thought the rest of the crew wasn't coming 'til next week?"

"They aren't," Adam replied darkly.

Time to step in. "There was some miscommunication, and I showed up a couple days early." That was all she needed to say, but the words just kept coming. "Wires getting crossed and all that, you know."

"Well, I'm glad you're here." Finally, he reached them, and as he extended a hand, their eyes locked.

All the air was sucked from the room as she looked into those oh so familiar blue eyes. His next words came to her as if from a far distance, and she hardly registered them.

"Peter Miller."

"It's not him." The woman in the mirror didn't look convinced. "It's not. Peeta's dead."

It was the name that was throwing her off. It had to be. She had seen dozens, maybe hundreds, of blonde, blue-eyed men over the years and hoped they were Peeta. But none of them had sent her to a mirror therapy session with herself.

"Peeta's dead," she repeated.

And he was, even if nobody had ever recovered a body. Search crews had combed every nook and cranny of Panem, sent out cadaver dogs, had put up thousands of posters all over West Virginia begging for any information on Peeta's disappearance and still found nothing, but all that meant was that the body was hidden somewhere clever. People didn't turn up eighteen years after going missing. It just didn't happen.

Except when it did. Katniss watched the news. She heard the same stories that everyone else did. But there was a reason the media loved those stories so much: they were miracles. And much as she wished things could be different, miracles didn't come to poor kids from Nowhere, West Virginia.

"Peter Miller. Pe-ter Mill-er." She'd hoped it wouldn't sound like Peeta Mellark when she said it like that. It didn't work.

Dear god, she needed to call someone. Katniss didn't have that option because phone use within the compound was limited to a monitored shared space, but mirror therapy wasn't cutting it today.

She couldn't think about this. She was going to drive herself crazy. Katniss pushed a rogue piece of hair back into place and looked straight into the mirror.

"You still need to unpack. Just keep busy, Everdeen."

Katniss had never thought of herself as a people person, but once she unpacked her bags, she wanted nothing more than someone to talk to. Maybe it was that there was nobody here that she could have a conversation with. Adam wasn't the talkative type. Peter? Absolutely not. He brought up too many emotions that she didn't care to deal with right now. She probably wouldn't be able to avoid the man forever, but she wasn't going to seek him out.

Instead, she found herself wandering through the corridors. Katniss intended to follow the tour Peter and Adam had taken her on earlier, and she managed to find the kitchen and one of the courtyards before she became hopelessly lost.

She grazed her fingers along the wall as she walked. The wall shifted from granite to metal to a dark, opaque glass and back again as she continued, each one as smooth and cool as the last. Katniss had not seen a window in ages, and she had not taken any of the many staircases she had come across, but she was a miner's daughter, and her intuition told her she was now underground. She must be far away from her room by now. Nothing here looked familiar, though really, this place threw her off so much that even the areas she knew she'd visited before felt alien.

When she heard footsteps, she instinctively froze. It took her rational mind a moment to realize how stupid that response was. A week early or not, she had been invited here, and to the best of her knowledge, everything she had accessed was a public area. Even if they weren't, it wasn't as though she was poking at computer terminals searching for trade secrets.

"Uncanny, right?"

Katniss jumped at the voice just behind her.

"Sorry," Peter said. "I thought you knew I was there."

"It's all right," she replied automatically. "I was distracted."

And I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. He had changed into a forest green sweater just tight enough to show the well-toned arms beneath, and Katniss caught a hint of musky, woodsy cologne.

He joined her at the window. "I think Adam does that to most people."

You're right, Mr. Miller. Right now, it's Adam that's distracting me.

Time to focus. "He's the project, isn't he?"

"The project?"

Did he really not know? "The one we're supposed to be working on, the secret one. It's Adam, isn't it? When I met him at the airport, I thought it might be shyness - I mean, we both know there are a lot of pretty weird people in computer science, it wouldn't be that surprising - but the more I see of him, the more I think it's more than that. I think we're here to see how long it takes us to realize he's a robot."

Peter laughed. "Then I guess you can go home. Project finished."

"Well, isn't he?"

"Between you and me," he began, his voice low and deep in a way that made Katniss want to lean in closer, "I think you might be on to something."

Katniss' eyes narrowed. "You know exactly what's going on. You just don't want to tell me."

"Can I say that you have excellent intuition?"

"You aren't going to tell me."

Peter grinned. "If you let me show you around, you can try to weasel information out of me."

He offered his arm, but Katniss hesitated. "Adam's already given me the tour."

"But if I know Adam, he's only shown you the essentials. I'll take you to the fun stuff."

Keep it together, Everdeen. "I suppose I can't say no to an offer like that."

"That's why I made it."

It was a long time before the man made a mistake. Peeta at first assumed that his door had been left unlocked as a trick, a test that he would be punished for failing if he left, but the longer it sat open, the more tempting it became. The other boy felt so close, and it had been so long since Peeta had seen anyone but the man that he could not resist the urge to wander beyond his room. The glowing red eye above his door brightened as he stepped outside, but he paid it no mind.

The hallway was made of glass, so alien from his little white room-world, and had he not been intent on his mission, Peeta would have stopped to marvel at the universe of browns and greens spread before the window. But the other boy was close, near enough that Peeta could hear his own footsteps echoing back at him through another mind, and he had to keep going.

He found himself huddled in the back corner of a room the perfect twin of his own. The boy's soft, peachy skin was more familiar than his own cool, grey covering. Though Peeta owned a mirror, had seen his own reflection thousands of times, he still half-expected to see those blue eyes in the place of the black pinpricks that sit where his eyes ought to be.

"Hello." The shadow boy flinched, and Peeta knew that he was hideous in a way the golden boy he saw in his mind's mirror could never be.

"I want to be your friend," Peeta pressed. He remembered friends, in that blurry way that he remembered taste and smell and music, but he wanted the kind of memories that he could touch.

He heard the other Peeta's answer before he spoke it. "I'm not sure I want to be yours."

"I already know you. I like you."

"I'm afraid of you."

"Don't be. I won't hurt you." He knew too well what it was to be hurt to ever inflict pain on another. "Have you seen the green?" He had, of course, for Peeta had sat in the other one's memories of wrestling in patches of verdant green with his brothers, of evergreen trees as tall as the sky, but he did not want to scare his friend.

His eyes sparkled. "Can you take me into it?"

"I don't know. I can try."

The shadow Peeta stood up. The boy peeled the sticky white electrodes from his forehead and wrists, revealing the red-brown burns beneath, and Peeta recognized the scars as his own, though no such marks marred his smooth metallic shell. Peeta held out his hand, and the other boy accepted it. Touch lit up as brilliant blue as electricity, but with none of the pain, and he gasped.

"Did I hurt you?" Now, the shadow boy glowed as golden as the sun.

"No. You're nice."

He smiled. "You too." Hand in hand, they stepped outside. Three walls of cool, smooth glass, and beyond it, the forest spread as far as they could see. Both pressed their noses to the glass, but only the other boy's breath fogged it.

"I don't think he wants us to go outside," the other Peeta said.

"I want to go."

"Me too."

The air was crisp, and Peeta tasted leaves on the breeze. He closed his eyes and inhaled as much of it as he could, storing every sensation for when he would again be trapped in his lonely cell.

"It's autumn," the other boy explained. "But it's early autumn. That's why some of the leaves are red. More will turn later."

"I like autumn."

"I think you would like all the seasons."

"Probably. But I like autumn the best, just like you."