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Garrett Everdeen is naked on Ilona’s kitchen table.
It’s not supposed to be the first thing she notices, considering his back is a mess of tangled skin and blood and raw muscle and the rest of him seems to spill out of that, a knot of twitching limbs and raw white teeth. His eyes are screwed shut as if someone sewed them down and his long black braid hangs with strips of his own flesh. But no, the first thing Ilona notices is that he’s Garret Everdeen, and he’s naked, and he’s on her kitchen table, and everything else hits her all at once like a slap to the face.
It’s nothing compared with what he feels, and she knows it.
“We’ll be lucky if the Peacekeepers don’t take my license for this,” Ilona’s father says, heating water on the stove. “Take over,” he commands, and Ilona steps into her father’s place over the saucepan. He hasn’t added the iodine yet, so she measures it out, lets the steam wash over her cheeks and eyelashes. Her hair slips into her face, so she makes sure to tie it back.
Soon enough, her father starts passing her scalpels and tools and bottles to sterilize, and she drops them into the water one at a time, and the tongs for good measure. She doesn’t ask her father any questions about what went on, and doesn’t dare ask Garrett, since even if he could respond it probably shouldn’t be to her.
She takes the knives out with the tongs, one by one, and sets them on a towel to dry. Her father has finished mixing up a poultice and sets it on the stove to warm, then goes around to the front of the table and kneels to Garret’s level. “Still conscious?”
“Yeah,” Garret says, “sorry,” and though it’s barely a whisper Ilona can still hear it in the same place his songs reach. All in the breathing, he told someone once, when Ilona wasn’t supposed to be listening. If you sing from the same place you breathe, they can hear you wherever you want to be heard, and some places you don’t.
“Don’t apologize to me for staying awake,” Ilona’s father says, and gently pats Garrett on the arm as he stands up. “The question is, do you want to?”
“Not sure it matters.” How Garrett can laugh at a time like this, Ilona doesn’t know. “If the pain hasn’t—ah—knocked me out by now, I don’t think it will.”
Ilona’s father sighs. “You haven’t felt the real pain yet.”
“Then I probably want something to hold it off. This is bad enough.”
Ilona pours the sterilizing water down the sink, then sets the saucepan aside to cool. She doesn’t wait to be asked, just heads out of the kitchen and through the house to the storefront. Someone’ll have to pay for it, but there’s probably some morphling they haven’t sold yet—
“Miss Teller,” one of the Peacekeepers in the doorway says, tipping his helmet. The other stands in the door, gun across his chest. “Don’t worry, you didn’t keep us waiting long.”
“I didn’t know you were here, sir,” she says.
“We’ll talk to the head, get you a bell for your door.” He leans on the countertop, looks up at her with his jewel-bright Capitol eyes. She wonders if he’s one of the ones who stood guard at the whipping, if that’s Garrett’s blood staining his crisp white shoes. He didn’t wipe his feet on the way in. Peacekeepers never do. “Right now, though, I’m sorry, but we’re just making sure; there’s a trail of blood leading straight to your back door. You aren’t treating any criminals in here, are you?”
Ilona glowers. “What if we are, sir?”
“Well, that’s the criminal’s business, so long as he’s already had his sentence done. But that means he has to pay for it. And considering this is a business and all—”
“He’ll pay,” Ilona says. “He’ll be back at the mines soon as he can, and we’ll make him pay, if you’re so concerned.”
“That’s good to know. But in the meantime, I’ve got some business to do here too. There’s a recall order from the Capitol. You didn’t get any morphling in with the last shipment, did you?”
“We did,” she answers, “but that’s all we’ve got.”
“Hand it over, then. I’ll be taking that back to the Head until we’ve got further orders. And I’ll need a list of the people you’ve sold it to since you got that shipment in, just to make sure no one’s using anything that’ll kill ‘em. Got that?”
The recall order is, to put it bluntly, a load of manure, but Ilona gets out the register all the same. The Peacekeeper looks over her shoulder as she copies down the list, the three or four people in the district who can afford to buy morphling and the amount they allotted to the emergency kits at the mines. Once that’s done, she tells him to sit tight, but he follows her to the locked cabinet. She wishes she could palm coins like some of the kids at school, or that she was wearing long sleeves, or anything, but the Peacekeeper counts each bottle with his eyes and she hands every single one of them over.
“Thanks,” he says, like it was a favor and not an order. “We’ll return or replace them soon as we can. Take care, Miss Teller.”
“Take care,” she repeats, no matter how much she’d rather tell him to go hang himself in the square, or at least that the door would hit him on the way out. It doesn’t.
Ilona takes a deep breath, and grabs a bottle of the strongest painkillers they have, not that they’ll ever be enough.
She tries not to walk into the kitchen with her figurative tail between her legs, but it’s hard to keep her head high after that. “They confiscated our morphling,” she says, before her father can ask. “Is this enough for now?”
Garrett laughs between his teeth, then backs out a sharp cry as Ilona’s father cuts through a hanging strip of his skin, too thin to replace. “Anything’s fine,” he says, and Ilona would swear he is trying to smile at her, but she’s seen plenty of people delirious with pain smile almost like that, and she tries not to read into it.
“Let me professionally disagree,” Ilona’s father says, setting a larger patch of skin back into place and cleaning under and around it. “They’re fine for a last resort. Do you think you can hold on a little longer?”
“I don’t have much of a choice.”
“Then Ilona, I need you to go to the Victor’s Village.”
She blinks. “What’s in the Victor’s Village?”
“Haymitch,” her father and Garrett answer at the same time, though her father’s is just an answer and Garrett’s is more stilted almost-laughter. Her father goes on, “He might have something Persil left behind, and even if he doesn’t have any morphling he’ll at least have something to knock Garrett out.”
That’s fair, Ilona thinks. “Okay,” she says, and grabs her jacket from the board by the back door. She has long since learned never to ask, are you sure you don’t need me here? It wastes time.
The trek from the center of town to the Victor’s Village is shorter than it would be from any other part of the district, but still far enough that Ilona thinks the victors can, or could, pretend they weren’t here. It’s an hour each way. Pine needles litter the side of the path, but no cones yet, and Ilona knows Garrett would have something to say about it if he were here. She tries not to think about the state of his back and the way he’s trying to smile, but dismissing the sound of his voice in her ears is damn near impossible. Just the way he counts out what he’s brought her that day: Marigolds and willow bark today, just this past Sunday, I’m sorry I found the marigolds so late in the season. He was probably out in the meadow getting the rest of them today when the Peacekeepers caught him.
To think, they’ll flog a man half to death for gathering flowers.
Garrett doesn’t just forage, and everyone knows it. But if the Peacekeepers found one of his hollow logs or snares or caught him with game, they haven’t said anything.
All the lights in Haymitch’s house are on, except the ones on the porch, so the windows stand out like a close cluster of stars. Ilona slows down on her way over, careful of the broken glass strewn all over his lawn. But there’s no sense in dallying, and less in holding her breath, so she knocks on the door loud enough to wake the dead.
For all of a minute Ilona is afraid she’s going to have to return empty-handed, but then there’s a clatter and a shout and a few choice filthy slurs from inside. Ilona stands back from the door, careful not to put her hands behind her back.
Haymitch used to be one of the most handsome boys at school. Then the Quarter Quell happened, and for the first six months after no one could say a bad word about him. For one thing, after his mother and brother died, that awful hardness in his eyes had burned away, and the rest of him grew up as if grief was a kind of benchmark, a last step to make a good-looking man too beautiful to touch. Ilona remembers she and Columbine Donner used to talk about who they’d want to fool around with, of all the men in town, and Columbine didn’t have much shame about saying she wouldn’t mind the privilege. Ilona understood, then. She doesn’t now, not with the way Haymitch’s ribs spear out of his chest and his skin yellows at the thinnest places, and he smells like sweat and sex instead of motor oil and coal like he used to.
He answers the door with one arm on the jamb like he can’t stand up otherwise. He’s not wearing a shirt, and Ilona scrunches up her nose and tries not to think about the stench. “And what d’you want?”
“They flogged Garrett Everdeen in the square today,” she says. “And they confiscated our morphling.”
“Then they obviously want him to suffer,” he snaps back.
“Well, do you?”
He glares at her, through the scraggly mess of his hair. She remembers he killed seven kids on television, most of them younger than Ilona is now.
She doesn’t care. “Do you?” she asks again.
His hand slides down from the doorjamb, curls into a loose fist at his side. “Just give me a minute,” he says, a growl on the edge of his voice as he turns away. “Come in if you want.”
“I don’t,” she says, “but thank you.”
He leaves the door open, but she turns away, a hand over her mouth now that he’s not looking. There’s more of a clatter from inside, and she shuts her eyes and tries not to think about just how much she’ll have to sterilize whatever bottle Haymitch comes up with. He comes to the door again and coughs, once and hard, and holds out two bottles, one large and one small. The alcohol is pretty obvious, and not the white liquor Ilona has seen some people bring back from the Hob. The smaller bottle is full of pills.
“Get your dad to verify these,” Haymitch says. “And if they’re crap, Garret can have this with my goddamn blessing,” he adds, shaking the bottle once, but nothing sloshes. It’s unopened.
Ilona nods. “Thank you.”
“You want me to come down there with you?”
“No, it’s fine,” she says, but gives it a second thought. “Come tomorrow, though, that way you won’t bother my dad. We’re gonna put Garrett up for a while.” She thinks of adding, shower first, but that’s none to polite to say to someone who’s sticking his neck out for you.
He nods and says he will, then scraps a hand through his hair. “Well, if you ain’t waiting for me, I think he’d appreciate it if you ran.”
She takes a deep breath, or as deep of one as she can around this house, and turns tail for home.
Her father is already done by the time she makes it back. Only Garrett is in the kitchen, stretched out on the table, still as the furniture. He might be asleep, so she shuts the door quietly, braces it on her palm so the latch doesn’t click. And that’s good of her, since even if Garrett might not be asleep, her father definitely is, on his chair in the corner of the next room.
The overhead light shines down on Garrett’s back, a mass of poultice and stitchwork and iodine. It’s probably not proper to say, but the crushed herbs and honey actually bring out the color of what healthy skin is left, and now that the blood is gone he’s so clean he shines. Ilona’s breath stalls in her throat, and she thinks if it never came out she wouldn’t mind.
“Welcome back,” he murmurs, turns his head to the side and looks up at her through his eyelashes. “Sorry to trouble you.”
“It’s never a trouble,” she says.
“Well, not for you.” His laughter shakes his shoulders, and she can see the corners of his mouth strain when the pain makes that laugh turn into a hiss. “I’ve gone through less to get to your door.”
A flush creeps up her cheeks. “Haymitch came through,” she says, and shakes the bottle of pills. “Though I don’t know what these are.”
“You don’t have to wake your dad,” Garrett says. “The worst is probably over, he said so.”
She nods, and leaves the pills on the counter, but goes for the corkscrew and opens the liquor. “He sent this too.”
“Then I guess I owe him almost as much as you.”
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“Your dad said I could stay here until I can get out. Of course I owe you.”
“No, really, Garrett—” She cuts herself off, and sets down a glass. “You can’t owe me for something I want to give.”
He doesn’t say a thing, and the sound of alcohol flowing into the glass echoes through an almost empty room. Ilona raises the glass to her own lips to take a sip of it—it’s vile, but strong, and should at least help Garrett sleep, until her father wakes up and gets to work again.
She pulls up one of the kitchen chairs, and steadies a hand on Garrett’s upper arm where the whip didn’t quite get him. “Need help lifting?”
“Just tilt it for me,” he says, and manages to stretch his lips to the glass. He takes a slow breath, the way he does when he sings, and she tips back the glass, slow enough that nothing will splash if it makes him cough. He does, halfway down, but he just wets his lips and says it’s fine, go on.
There’s a thin layer of sweat on his arm, creeping toward the poulticed cuts. She puts the glass down once he’s done, and wipes the streak away.
“Why do you go out there?” she asks, before she can stop herself.
“So many reasons,” he says, his voice a bit raw from the liquor, but soft, and resonant, and lovely like sleep. “I have to feed my mother,” he starts, “and I can’t stand the fence. I never could. But mostly...well. Someone has to bring you and your dad what you need.”
“It doesn’t have to be you,” Ilona whispers, and covers her eye with the towel. There might be something in it.
He sighs, and settles closer to the table. “But I want it to be.”
Garrett Everdeen is naked on Ilona’s kitchen table. He’s in much better shape than he was when she first saw him like that, with his wounds cleaned and his needs met and a smile on his lips that isn’t all pain. But beyond setting his long braid off to the side, Ilona’s father hadn’t cleaned it, and there are still streaks of dried blood, filtering to brown amid the black.
Ilona gets up from her chair, and finds her schoolbag on the pegboard near the back door. She rifles through it for a hairbrush and sits back down, tilting Garrett’s head so that his hair spills into her lap, and he lets her without a word. She undoes the braid, piece by piece, and washes the blood away with water from the sink, and brushes it until he falls asleep.