The Girl Who Sparked the Capitol - Book 2 - Peeta

Chapter 1

Alessia clasps the flask between her hands even though the warmth from the tea has long since leached into the frozen air. Her muscles start to clench tight against the cold. If a pack of wild dogs were to appear at this moment, the odds of scaling a tree before they attacked are not in her favor. She thinks she should get up, move around, and work the stiffness from her limbs. But instead sits, as motionless as the rock beneath her, while the dawn begins to lighten the woods. She can't fight the sun. She can only watch helplessly as it drags her into a day that she has been dreading for months.

By noon they will all be at her house in the Victor's village. The reporters, the camera crews, even Effie Trinket, her old escort, will have made their way to District 12 from the Capitol. She wonders if Effie will still be wearing that silly pink wig, or if she'll be sporting some other unnatural color especially for the Victory Tour. There will be others waiting, too. A staff to cater to her every need on the long train trip. A prep team to beautify her for public appearances. Her stylist friend, Cinna, who designed the gorgeous outfits that first made the audience take notice of her in the Hunger Games.

If it were up to Alessia, she would try to forget the Hunger Games entirely. Never speak of them. Pretend they were nothing but a bad dream. But the Victory Tour makes that impossible. Strategically placed almost midway between the annual Games, it is the Capitol's way of keeping the horror fresh and immediate. Not only are they in the districts forced to remember the iron grip of the Capitol's power each year, they're forced to celebrate it. And this year, Alessia is one of the stars of the show. She has to travel from district to district, to stand before the cheering crowds who secretly loathe her, to look down into the faces of the families whose children she has killed...

The sun persists in rising, so she makes herself stand. All of her joints complain and her left leg has been asleep for so long that it takes several minutes of pacing to bring the feeling back into it. She's been in the woods for three hours, but as she's made no real attempt at hunting, she has nothing to show for it. It doesn't matter for her best friend Katniss and Katniss' family anymore. They now live with her and have "adopted" her into their family. They can now afford to buy butcher meat in town, although none of them like it any better than fresh game. But, her 2nd best friend, Gale Hawthorne, and his family will be depending on today's haul and Alessia can't let them down. She starts the hour-and-a-half trek it will take to cover their snare line. Back when they were in school, they had time in the afternoons to check the line and hunt and gather and still get back to trade in town. But now that Gale has gone to work in the coal mines - and Katniss is busy helping her mother and sister - and Alessia has nothing to do all day - Alessia has taken over the job.

By this time Gale will have clocked in at the mines, taken the stomach-churning elevator ride into the depths of the earth, and be pounding away at a coal seam. Alessia knows what it's like down there. Every year in school, as part of their training, her class had to tour the mines. When she was little, it was just unpleasant. The claustrophobic tunnels, foul air, suffocating darkness on all sides. Alessia's father had worked down there with Katniss' father and had to deal with the death of Katniss'. Months later, Alessia's parents had died. Many deaths her and Katniss had faced were because of those mines and the explosions that had killed many. The annual school trip for the two girls became an enormous source of anxiety. Twice, Alessia made herself so sick in anticipation of it that Katniss' mother had kept her home because she thought Alessia had contracted the flu.

She thinks of Gale, who is only really alive in the woods, with its fresh air and sunlight and clean, flowing water. Alessia doesn't know how he stands it. Well... yes, she does. He stands it because it's the way to feed his mother and two younger brothers and sister. And here she is with buckets of money, far more than enough to feed both their families now, and he won't take a single coin. It's even hard for him to let her bring in meat, although he'd surely have kept Katniss, Katniss' mother, Prim and even her family if they weren't dead supplied if she had been killed in the Games. Alessia tells him he's doing her a favor, that it drives her nuts to sit around all day. Even so, she never drops off the game while he's at home. Which is easy since he works twelve hours a day.