The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins [101]
“Your boots and socks are still damp and the weather’s not helping much,” he says. There’s a clap of thunder, and I see lightning electrify the sky through an opening in the rocks. Rain drips through several holes in the ceiling, but Peeta has built a sort of canopy over my head an upper body by wedging the square of plastic into the rock above me.
“I wonder what brought on this storm? I mean, who’s the target?” says Peeta.
“Cato and Thresh,” I say without thinking. “Foxface will be in her den somewhere, and Clove... she cut me an then...”
My voice trails off.
“I know Clove’s dead. I saw it in the sky last night,” h says.
“Did you kill her?”
“No. Thresh broke her skull with a rock,” I say.
“Lucky he didn’t catch you, too,” says Peeta.
The memory of the feast returns full-force and I feel sick.
“He did. But he let me go.” Then, of course, I have to tell him. About things I’ve kept to myself because he was too sick to ask and I wasn’t ready to relive anyway. Like the explosion and my ear and Rue’s dying and the boy from District 1 and the bread. All of which leads to what happened with Thresh and how he was paying off a debt of sorts.
“He let you go because he didn’t want to owe you anything?” asks Peeta in disbelief.
“Yes. I don’t expect you to understand it. You’ve always had enough. But if you’d lived in the Seam, I wouldn’t have to explain,” I say.
“And don’t try. Obviously I’m too dim to get it.”
“It’s like the bread. How I never seem to get over owing you for that,” I say.
“The bread? What? From when we were kids?” he says. “I think we can let that go. I mean, you just brought me back from the dead.”
“But you didn’t know me. We had never even spoken. Besides, it’s the first gift that’s always the hardest to pay back. I wouldn’t even have been here to do it if you hadn’t helped me then,” I say. “Why did you, anyway?”
“Why? You know why,” Peeta says. I give my head a slight, painful shake. “Haymitch said you would take a lot of convincing.”
“Haymitch?” I ask. “What’s he got to do with it?”
“Nothing,” Peeta says. “So, Cato and Thresh, huh? I guess it’s too much to hope that they’ll simultaneously destroy each other?”
But the thought only upsets me. “I think we would like Thresh. I think he’d be our friend back in District Twelve,” I say.
“Then let’s hope Cato kills him, so we don’t have to,” says Peeta grimly.
I don’t want Cato to kill Thresh at all. I don’t want anyone else to die. But this is absolutely not the kind of thing that victors go around saying in the arena. Despite my best efforts, I can feel tears starting to pool in my eyes.
Peeta looks at me in concern. “What is it? Are you in a lot of pain?”
I give him another answer, because it is equally true but can be taken as a brief moment of weakness instead of a terminal one. “I want to go home, Peeta,” I say plaintively, like a small child.
“You will. I promise,” he says, and bends over to give me a kiss.
“I want to go home now,” I say.
“Tell you what. You go back to sleep and dream of home. And you’ll be there for real before you know it,” lie says.
“Okay?”
“Okay,” I whisper. “Wake me if you need me to keep watch.”
“I’m good and rested, thanks to you and Haymitch. Besides, who knows how long this will last?” he says.
What does he mean? The storm? The brief respite it brings us? The Games themselves? I don’t know, but I’m ion sad and tired to ask.
It’s evening when Peeta wakes me again. The rain has turned to a downpour, sending streams of water through our ceiling where earlier there had been only drips. Peeta has placed the broth pot under the worst one and repositioned the plastic to deflect most of it from me. I feel a bit better, able to sit up without getting too dizzy, and I’m absolutely famished. So is Peeta. It’s clear he’s been waiting for me to wake up to eat and is eager to get started.
There’s not much left. Two pieces of groosling, a