Pawn of Panem | Finnick Odair [2]

I Love You : 19

Chapter Nineteen

What will break me?

This is the question that consumes me over the next three days as we wait to be released from our prison of safety. What will break me into a million pieces so that I am beyond repair, beyond usefulness? I mention it to no one, but it devours my waking hours and weaves itself throughout my nightmares.

Four more bunker missiles fall over this period, all massive, all very damaging, but there's no urgency to the attack. The bombs are spread out over the long hours so that just when you think the raid is over, another blast sends shock waves through your guts. It feels more designed to keep us in lockdown than to decimate 13.

Cripple the district, yes. Give the people plenty to do to get the place running again. But destroy it? No. Coin was right on that point. You don't destroy what you want to acquire in the future. I assume what they really want, in the short term, is to stop the Airtime Assaults and keep Katniss and I off the televisions of Panem.

We receive next to no information about what is happening. Our screens never come on, and we get only brief audio updates from Coin about the nature of the bombs. Certainly, the war is still being waged, but as to its status, we're in the dark.

Inside the bunker, cooperation is the order of the day. We adhere to a strict schedule for meals and bathing, exercise and sleep. Small periods of socialization are granted to alleviate the tedium.

The power's been coming and going; sometimes the lamps burn at full brightness, other times we squint at one another in the brownouts. At bedtime they turn the lamps to near darkness and activate safety lights in each space. Prim, who's decided the walls will hold up, snuggles with her car on the lower bunk.

In our sleeping arrangement, Finnick was assigned an official cot on the other side of the floor. My mother's on the upper bunk. I offer to take a bunk, but she makes me keep to the floor mattress since I flail around so much when I'm sleeping.

I'm not flailing now, as my muscles are rigid with the tension of holding myself together. The pain over my heart returns, and from it I imagine tiny fissures spreading out into my body. Through my torso, down my arms and legs, over my face, leaving it crisscrossed with cracks. One good jolt of a bunker missile and I could shatter into strange, razor-sharp shards.

When the restless, wiggling majority has settled into sleep, I carefully extricate myself from my blanket and tiptoe through the cavern until I find Finnick, feeling for some unspecified reason that he will understand. Because he always understands. Because he is one of the only people I trust.

Somehow, I find my way to his cot, and find that he is fast asleep under the glowing emergency light. At first, I think I shouldn't wake him, but the way his chest rises and falls as he breathes pushes me to wake him.

"Finnick?" I whisper, reaching out and poking him with a finger. "Finnick?"

His eyes open, and I can tell that he's been dreaming of a nightmare. He looks up at me, and it feels as though my entire world stops to stare into his eyes as he bores his into mine, "Sage?"

I swallow, "Can we talk?"

Finnick nods and sits up. I take him by the hand and navigate my way through the sets of people and bunks, and to the bath section. Next to the bath section, I open a maintenance door that's labeled OFFICIALS ONLY. Inside, the room houses one cot, and an orange light that illuminates anything it can touch. I assume this room has many others like it, and it would be used for quarantine if anyone would get sick. I found it when I couldn't stand anymore people and just needed a break.