Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins [112]
Wiress nods and scampers over to the water's edge, where she dunks the coil in the water. She starts quietly singing some funny little song, about a mouse running up a clock. It must be for children, but it seems to make her happy.
“Oh, not the song again,” says Johanna, rolling her eyes. “That went on for hours before she started tick-tocking.”
Suddenly Wiress stands up very straight and points to the jungle. “Two,” she says.
I follow her finger to where the wall of fog has just begun to seep out onto the beach. “Yes, look, Wiress is right. It's two o'clock and the fog has started.”
“Like clockwork,” says Peeta. “You were very smart to figure that out, Wiress.”
Wiress smiles and goes back to singing and dunking her coil. “Oh, she's more than smart,” says Beetee. “She's intuitive.” We all turn to look at Beetee, who seems to be coming back to life. “She can sense things before anyone else. Like a canary in one of your coal mines.”
“What's that?” Finnick asks me.
“It's a bird that we take down into the mines to warn us if there's bad air,” I say.
“What's it do, die?” asks Johanna.
“It stops singing first. That's when you should get out. But if the air's too bad, it dies, yes. And so do you.” I don't want to talk about dying songbirds. They bring up thoughts of my father's death and Rue's death and Maysilee Donner's death and my mother inheriting her songbird. Oh, great, and now I'm thinking of Gale, deep down in that horrible mine, with President Snow's threat hanging over his head. So easy to make it look like an accident down there. A silent canary, a spark, and nothing more.
I go back to imagining killing the president.
Despite her annoyance at Wiress, Johanna's as happy as I've seen her in the arena. While I'm adding to my stock of arrows, she pokes around until she comes up with a pair of lethal-looking axes. It seems an odd choice until I see her throw one with such force it sticks in the sun-softened gold of the Cornucopia. Of course. Johanna Mason. District 7. Lumber. I bet she's been tossing around axes since she could toddle. It's like Finnick with his trident. Or Beetee with his wire. Rue with her knowledge of plants. I realize it's just another disadvantage the District 12 tributes have faced over the years. We don't go down in the mines until we're eighteen. It looks like most of the other tributes learn something about their trades early on. There are things you do in a mine that could come in handy in the Games. Wielding a pick. Blowing things up. Give you an edge. The way my hunting did. But we learn them too late.
While I've been messing with the weapons, Peeta's been squatting on the ground, drawing something with the tip of his knife on a large, smooth leaf he brought from the jungle.
I look over his shoulder and see he's creating a map of the arena. In the center is the Cornucopia on its circle of sand with the twelve strips branching out from it. It looks like a pie sliced into twelve equal wedges. There's another circle representing the waterline and a slightly larger one indicating the edge of the jungle. “Look how the Cornucopia's positioned,” he says to me.
I examine the Cornucopia and see what he means. “The tail points toward twelve o'clock,” I say.
“Right, so this is the top of our clock,” he says, and quickly scratches the numbers one through twelve around the clock face. “Twelve to one is the lightning zone.” He writes lightning in tiny print in the corresponding wedge, then works clockwise adding blood, fog, and monkeys in the following sections.
“And ten to eleven is the wave,” I say. He adds it. Finnick and Johanna join us at this point, armed to the teeth with tridents, axes, and knives.
“Did you notice anything unusual in the others?” I ask Johanna and Beetee, since they might have seen something we didn't. But all they've seen is a lot of blood. “I guess they could hold anything.”
“I'm going to mark the ones where we know the Gamemakers' weapon follows us out past the jungle, so we'll stay clear