Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins [116]
It's no effort to track him, even though he's moving so fast, since he leaves a clear, trampled path in his wake. But the bird is at least a quarter mile away, most of it uphill, and by the time I reach him, I'm winded. He's circling around a giant tree. The trunk must be four feet in diameter and the limbs don't even begin until twenty feet up. The woman's shrieks emanate from somewhere in the foliage, but the jabberjay's concealed. Finnick's screaming as well, over and over. “Annie! Annie!” He's in a state of panic and completely unreachable, so I do what I would do anyway. I scale an adjacent tree, locate the jabberjay, and take it out with an arrow. It falls straight down, landing right at Finnick's feet. He picks it up, slowly making the connection, but when I slide down to join him, he looks more despairing than ever.
“It's all right, Finnick. It's just a jabberjay. They're playing a trick on us,” I say. “It's not real. It's not your ... Annie.”
“No, it's not Annie. But the voice was hers. Jabberjays mimic what they hear. Where did they get those screams, Katniss?” he says.
I can feel my own cheeks grow pale as I understand his meaning. “Oh, Finnick, you don't think they ...”
“Yes. I do. That's exactly what I think,” he says.
I have an image of Prim in a white room, strapped to a table, while masked, robed figures elicit those sounds from her. Somewhere they are torturing her, or did torture her, to get those sounds. My knees turn to water and I sink to the ground. Finnick is trying to tell me something, but I can't hear him. What I do finally hear is another bird starting up somewhere off to my left. And this time, the voice is Gale's.
Finnick catches my arm before I can run. “No. It's not him.” He starts pulling me downhill, toward the beach. “We're getting out of here!” But Gale's voice is so full of pain I can't help struggling to reach it. “It's not him, Katniss! It's a mutt!” Finnick shouts at me. “Come on!” He moves me along, half dragging, half carrying me, until I can process what he said. He's right, it's just another jabberjay. I can't help Gale by chasing it down. But that doesn't change the fact that it is Gale's voice, and somewhere, sometime, someone has made him sound like this.
I stop fighting Finnick, though, and like the night in the fog, I flee what I can't fight. What can only do me harm. Only this time it's my heart and not my body that's disintegrating. This must be another weapon of the clock. Four o'clock, I guess. When the hands tick-tock onto the four, the monkeys go home and the jabberjays come out to play. Finnick is right—getting out of here is the only thing to do. Although there will be nothing Haymitch can send in a parachute that will help either Finnick or me recover from the wounds the birds have inflicted.
I catch sight of Peeta and Johanna standing at the tree line and I'm filled with a mixture of relief and anger. Why didn't Peeta come to help me? Why did no one come after us? Even now he hangs back, his hands raised, palms toward us, lips moving but no words reaching us. Why?,
The wall is so transparent, Finnick and I run smack into it and bounce back onto the jungle floor. I'm lucky. My shoulder took the worst of the impact, whereas Finnick hit face-first and now his nose is gushing blood. This is why Peeta and Johanna and even Beetee, who I see sadly shaking his head behind them, have not come to our aid. An invisible barrier blocks the area in front of us. It's not a force field. You can touch the hard, smooth surface all you like. But Peeta's knife and Johanna's ax can't make a dent in it. I know, without checking more than a few feet to one side, that it encloses the entire four-to-five-o'clock