Sugarcubes // Finnick Odair - Hunger Games Fanfic

XXI.

Finnick and I join the group under the golden horn just in time for Wiress's singing.

After Blight died, she sang the same song in a loop for hours on end as we found our way out of the forest. I love Beetee, and I've grown used to dealing with Wiress's quirks. But sometimes everybody is quick to get on my nerves. The sound of her song sets me off again, and I groan, putting my head on Finnick's shoulder.

"Oh, not the song again," I say, tiredly. "That went on for hours before she started tick-tocking."

Wiress seems to hear nothing other than the words 'tick-tocking' because she stands up straight again, holds the coil in one hand and points toward the jungle – "two", she says. And I spare her mirthless chuckle into Finnick's shoulder as Katniss says something about how smart she is.

Everybody knows that she's smart. There's no need to point it out at every interval like she's a toddler, I think viciously, staring at both newcomers from district 12, as they fawn over their adopted child.

The conversation turns toward District 12, and the canaries in their mines, and I lose interest. It's much more interesting to pick through the pile of forgotten weapons searching for something I might've missed the first time around. Finnick stands at guard, looking sort of ill at ease, as I stalk over to the remaining weapons and rummage around.

The fact that the game-makers didn't include backpacks this time around is sort of foreshadowing. That this game will be the most ruthless one in history. And hopefully, if all goes well with the rebellion, it will be the last one.

I come up out of the surface of the discarded weapons with two twin throwing axes, and a belt full of knives. I'm a little surprised that these things survived the rampage the careers must have led on the cornucopia, but they were buried pretty deep, so I suppose it's understandable.

I approach Finnick and clip the knives around his waist, seeing as my waist already hold one belt, and show off my new axes. I hold my axe and one of the throwing axes in one hand and throw the other one with as much force as I can muster into the gold of the cornucopia. It lands with a thud sticking into the horn, and Katniss looks up at me with horror. Maybe she didn't realize just how useful a weapon axes are.

Peeta fiddles around with a tip on a knife in the sand, so I drag Finnick over to examine. I look over his shoulder and see he's creating a map of the arena. In the center is the Cornucopia on its circle of sand with the twelve strips branching out from it. It looks like a pie sliced into twelve equal wedges. There's another circle representing the waterline and a slightly larger one indicating the edge of the jungle.

"Look how the cornucopia is positioned," He says to Katniss.

"The tail points to twelve o'clock." She says, and I observe that they're right.

"Right, so this is the top of our clock," he says, and quickly scratches the numbers one through twelve around the clock face. "Twelve to one is the lightning zone." He writes lightning in tiny print in the corresponding wedge, then works clockwise adding blood, fog, and monkeys in the following sections.

I think it's unwise to be discussing this in the open; it only gives the game makers a clear idea about how much we know and gives them a chance to mess it up. But, I suppose, there's no other way for us to make sure everybody is on the same page. Wiress sings happily, washing Beetee's coil.

"Ten to eleven is the wave," Finnick says from beside me, and Peeta adds it.

"Did you notice anything unusual in the others?" Katniss asks me, but I shake my head.

"All we saw was the blood. They could hold anything," I tell her, and Finnick squeezes my hand.

"I'm going to mark the ones where we know the Gamemakers' weapon follows us out past the jungle, so we'll stay clear of those," says Peeta, drawing diagonal lines on the fog and wave beaches. Then he sits back. "Well, it's a lot more than we knew this morning, anyway."