The Girl Who Sparked the Capitol - Book 2 - Peeta

Chapter 24

Where are they? What are they doing here? "Prim!" Alessia cries out. "Katniss!" Only another agonizing scream answers here. How did they get here?  Why are they part of the Games? "Prim!" 

Vines cut into her face and arms, creepers grab her feet. But she is getting closer to the screams. Closer. Very close now. Sweat pours down her face, stinging the healing acid wounds. She pants, trying to get some use out of the warm, moist air that seems empty of oxygen. Katniss makes a sound - such a lost, irretrievable sound - that Alessia can't even imagine what they have done to evoke it. 

"Katniss!" Alessia rips through a wall of green into a small clearing and the sound repeats of the two girls directly above her. Above her? Her head whips back. Do they have the girls up in the trees? Alessia desperately searches the branches but sees nothing. "Prim? Katniss?" She says pleadingly. She hears their but can't see either. Their next wails ring out, clear as a bell, and there's no mistaking the source. It's coming from the mouth of a small, crested black bird perched on a branch about ten feet over her head. And then she understands.

It's a jabberjay.

Alessia has never seen one before- she thought they no longer existed- and for a moment, as she leans against the trunk of a tree, clutching the stitch in her side, she examines it. The muttation, the forerunner, the father. She pulls up a mental image of a mockingbird, fuse it with the jabberjay, and yes, she can now see how they mated to make her mockingjay. There is nothing about the bird that suggests it's a mutt. Nothing except the horribly lifelike sounds of Prim and Katniss' voices streaming from its mouth. She silences it with an arrow in its throat. The bird falls to the ground. She removes her arrow and wrings its neck for good measure. Then she hurls the revolting thing into the jungle. No degree of hunger would ever tempt her to eat it. 

It wasn't real, she tells herself. The same way the muttation wolves last year weren't really the dead tributes, It's just a sadistic trick of the Gamemakers.

Finnick crashes into the clearing to find Alessia wiping her arrow clean with some moss. "Alessia?"

"It's okay. I'm okay," she says, although she doesn't feel okay at all. "I thought I heard my family but-" The piercing shriek cuts her off. It's another voice, not Prim's or Katniss's, maybe a young woman's. Alessia doesn't recognize it. But the effect on Finnick is instantaneous. The color vanishes from his face and Alessia can actually see his pupils dilate in fear. "Finnick, wait!" She says, reaching out to reassure him, but he's bolted away. Gone off in pursuit of the victim, as mindlessly as she pursued Katniss and Prim. "Finnick!" Alessia calls, but she knows he won't turn back and wait for her to give a rational explanation. So all she can do is follow him.

It's no effort to track him, even though he's moving 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 she reaches him, she's 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 Alessia does what she would do anyway. She scales an adjacent tree, locates the jabberjay, and takes 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 Alessia slides down to join him, he looks more despairing than ever. 

"It's all right, Finnick. It's just a jabberjay. They're playing tricks on us," she says. "It's not real. It's not your ... Annie."

"No, it's not Annie. But the voice is her's. Jabberjays mimic what they hear. Where did they get those screams, Alessia?" he says.