Chapter Text
Prim had seen more than enough mining accidents and bombings to know what it meant to burn. Even as she felt herself rolling and heard herself screaming, a cool, distant part of her was listing off all the horrifying details of what she’d endure if she didn’t die immediately.
But she was in the Capitol now. If the rebels won, they’d have access to its medical technology. If she could hold on long enough for them to get her to a doctor, maybe she’d live.
Was she still burning? She couldn’t feel anything now – not pain, not heat, not even her body touching the ground. She must be in shock. Shock, and full-thickness burns over most of her body. Even with Capitol technology, there was probably no surviving that.
If the rebels won, but Prim died, what would that do to Katniss?
Prim couldn’t die. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t. As she felt herself fading away, she held tight to that promise, and took it into the darkness with her.
Prim’s first coherent thought was, Capitol technology is better than I realized.
She vaguely recalled an eternity of pain and confusion, of bright lights shining in her eyes and cold metal slicing into her body. But now she lay in bed, under a warm blanket, and she felt no pain.
They had fixed her. She was alive. They had won.
Katniss must be waiting for Prim to wake up.
Prim opened her eyes.
She lay in a small white room, with only a few wires and tubes connecting her to machines. A man with purple eyes, hair, eyebrows, and elaborate swirling tattoos stood beside the bed, checking a monitor. At the foot of the bed stood the last person Prim would have expected: Coin, the president of District Thirteen. As Prim blinked in surprise, the air seemed to shimmer around Coin. Prim blinked again, deliberately, and the shimmer went away.
“Where’s Kat…” Prim’s words trailed off as she heard her own voice. It was hoarse as Buttercup’s rusty meows.
“You’ll see your sister soon enough,” said Coin. She turned to the purple man. “Well? How soon can you get her on her feet?”
The man flinched, bringing one hand up as if to block a blow. His fingernails were also purple. Then he hastily dropped his hand. “Today, President Coin. Now, if you like. Her muscular strength and lung capacity have been brought up to their previous levels – better, actually, I would think.” He let out a high-pitched, nervous giggle.
“Then get her up,” said Coin impatiently.
The doctor flipped down the blanket, sending a rush of cool air over Prim. She started to sit up, but was caught by the sight of her own body, barely covered by a flimsy gown: her legs, both covered in shiny, mottled scar tissue. Her right arm, the same. And her left… Incredulously, Prim raised her left arm, then closed her left hand into a fist. The rods and pulleys of the prosthesis smoothly clicked into place. A perfect replica of the bones and tendons of a human arm was attached to her shoulder, made of some light metal that looked like steel.
Dazed, Prim didn’t resist as the purple doctor tugged her to her feet. She wobbled, dizzy, but her weakness slowly ebbed as the man led her in circles around the room. The bottoms of her feet were tender, her calluses gone. She had none of the stiffness and limited range of motion that she should have had, with so much scar tissue. If they could re-grow damaged muscle and tissue, why couldn’t they have given her back her smooth pale skin? They had erased Katniss’s scars after her first Hunger Games. And why not give Prim a natural-looking prosthesis, like Peeta’s leg?
She halted, making the doctor stumble, then turned to stare at Coin. The air once again briefly shimmered around her.
“I want a mirror.” Prim’s voice was as raspy as before. Smoke and fire damage to her vocal cords, no doubt.
Coin’s lips twitched into something like a smile. “Are you sure?”
“I’m a medic,” said Prim. “I know what to expect.”
“I doubt that,” said Coin.
She snapped her fingers at the doctor, who fumbled at a switch on the wall. One white wall now reflected another white wall, a purple man, a gray-haired woman… and a girl Prim barely recognized. A girl with one arm of red flesh and one of steel bones. A girl with red rippled scars covering the top half of her face, as if she was masked. A girl with unnatural silver eyes.
“What happened to my eyes?” Prim asked.
“They were burned,” said the doctor. “Destroyed. We had to replace them. Luckily, the nerves weren’t damaged, or you’d be blind. That’s the one thing we can’t make from scratch. Maybe next year, if we get the funding.” He glanced hopefully at Coin, then cringed when she turned her expressionless gray gaze toward him.
“You may leave,” said Coin.
The doctor fled.
Part of Prim wanted to throw herself down on the bed and sob. Part of her wanted to laugh in delight that she was alive, and could walk and see and feel. Part wanted to demand of Coin why she had been deliberately altered to look damaged and strange. But the part of her that had taken over as she burned, the cool cautious part that thought and analyzed, was the one that spoke. “When can I see my sister?”
“Katniss is under the impression that you’re dead,” said Coin. “It will be a lovely surprise for her to find out that you aren’t. Unfortunately, your sister turned out to be a traitor. She tried to shoot me with one of those trademark arrows of hers. But I was protected by a force field.”
Coin lightly slapped at her own chest. The air shimmered, and her hand bounced away.
Prim’s thoughts spun in frantic circles. Was that true? Why would Coin lie? Was that why Prim had been altered, as punishment for Katniss? Wouldn’t it have been a worse punishment to have simply let Prim die?
“I wanted to find out who was loyal to me,” Coin explained, sounding as calm and reasonable as if she was telling Prim the day’s schedule. “So I let Katniss think you were dead. I wanted to see what she’d do if she wasn’t worried about protecting you. She and her friends took the opportunity to try to assassinate me and take over. But first, they voted to hold the next Hunger Games with Capitol children as tributes.”
“I don’t believe that,” Prim blurted out. “Katniss would never do that.”
Coin’s pale eyes narrowed. “I see. You have no trouble believing that your sister would try to murder me, but you find it impossible to believe that she’d vote to lawfully hold Hunger Games with enemy tributes?”
“No. I mean, yes. I mean, I don’t believe either!” Prim’s stumbling, raspy words sounded false even to herself.
“You were right the first time,” said Coin. “Katniss only voted for the Games in order to get an opportunity to assassinate me. She never thought they’d actually be held. But they will be. And you…”
Coin paused, giving Prim plenty of time to realize what Coin was going to say next. Prim’s ears were ringing, and she couldn’t feel the floor under her feet. Everything seemed unreal. Maybe she was going to pass out. People did sometimes, from purely emotional shock. But the feeling faded, leaving Prim standing with her sore feet on a cold hard floor, very much awake, in the grip of a terror she hadn’t felt when her home had been bombed, hadn’t felt when she’d gone to war, hadn’t even felt when the bomb had exploded in her face and she’d been eaten alive by fire.
She’d felt it, though, when her name had been called at the reaping.
“You’ll be a tribute,” said Coin. “And your sister will be your mentor.”
People talked about anger like it felt hot, but for Prim it had always felt cold. A sensation like icy water flowed down from her head to her toes, until her whole body was chilled. When she spoke, she felt as if her words would freeze and snap like frostbitten plants. “You can force me into the arena, but you can’t force me to kill.”
Coin shrugged. “Once you’re there, you can do whatever you like. It’s your death.”