The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (A Hunger Games Novel) (The Hunger Games)

Coriolanus knew bombs, and they terrified him. Even as the impact threw him off his feet and tossed him farther into the arena, his arms lifted to cover his head. When he hit the ground, he automatically flattened onto his belly, cheek pressed into the dust, one arm bent up to guard his exposed eye and ear.

The first explosion, which seemed to have come from the main gate, initiated a chain of eruptions around the arena. Running was out of the question. It was all he could do to cling to the rumbling ground, hope for it to stop, and try to keep his panic in check. He entered what he and Tigris had nicknamed “bomb time,” that surreal period when moments stretched and contracted in ways that seemed to defy science.

During the war, the Capitol had assigned every citizen a shelter near their residence. The Snows’ magnificent building had a basement level so sturdy and spacious it accommodated not only its residents but half the block. Unfortunately, the Capitol’s surveillance system depended heavily on electricity. With the power sketchy and the grid flickering on and off like a firefly due to rebel interference in District 5, the sirens were unreliable, and they were often caught unawares with no time to retreat to the basement. At these times, he, Tigris, and the Grandma’am — unless she was singing the anthem — would hide under the dining table, an impressive thing carved from a single block of marble, which sat in an interior room. Even with the absence of windows and the solid rock over his head, Coriolanus’s muscles always went rigid with terror when he heard the whistling of the bombs, and it would be hours before he felt he could walk right. The streets weren’t safe either, nor the Academy. You could be bombed anywhere, but usually he had a better place to shelter than this. Now, naked to the attack, lying in the open air, he waited for the interminable “bomb time” to end and wondered how much damage his internal organs were incurring.

No hovercraft. The realization bubbled up in his brain. There had been no hovercraft. These bombs had been planted, then? He could smell smoke, so some of them were probably incendiary. He pressed his daily handkerchief over his mouth and nose. Squinting through the black haze thickened with dirt from the arena, he could see Lucy Gray about fifteen feet away, curled up in a ball, forehead on the ground and fingertips lodged in her ears, which was the best she could do with the cuffs on. She coughed helplessly.

“Cover your face! Use the napkin!” he called out. She didn’t look over but must have heard, because she rolled to her side and retrieved it from her pocket. The biscuits and chicken fell to the ground as she pressed the cloth to her face. He had a vague thought that this would not be conducive to her singing.

A lull fooled him into thinking the episode had ended, but just as he lifted his head, a final explosion in the stands above him demolished what had once been a snack stand — that pink spun sugar, those caramel-coated apples — and burning debris rained down on him. Something struck his head hard, and the heavy weight of a beam landed diagonally across his back, pinning him to the ground.

Stunned, Coriolanus lay almost senseless for a bit. The acrid smell of burning stung his nose, and he realized the beam was on fire. He tried to pull himself together and wriggle free, but the world swam and the peach pie turned sour in his stomach.

“Help!” he cried. Similar pleas came from around him, but he couldn’t see the injured through the cloud. “Help!”

The fire singed his hair, and with renewed effort he tried to struggle from under the beam, to no avail. A searing pain began to eat into his neck and shoulder as the horrifying realization that he was burning to death overtook him. He screamed, again and again, but seemed alone in a bubble of dark smoke and flaming rubble. Then he could make out a figure rising from the inferno. Lucy Gray said his name, then snapped her head around, something out of his view catching her attention. Her feet took a few steps away from him, then she hesitated, apparently torn.

“Lucy Gray!” he pleaded in a ragged voice. “Please!”

She gave a last look at whatever had tempted her and ran to his side. The beam shifted off his back but then slammed down again. It rose a second time, leaving him just enough room to drag himself from beneath it. She helped him to his feet, and with his arm slung across her shoulders, they limped away from the flames until they collapsed somewhere in the middle of the arena.

At first, coughing and gagging required all his attention, but he slowly registered the pain in his head, the burns along his neck, back, and shoulders. Somehow his fingers were knotted in Lucy Gray’s scorched skirt, as if it were his lifeline. Her cuffed hands, visibly burned, curled nearby.

The smoke settled enough that he could see the pattern the bombs had been planted in at intervals around the arena, with the mother lode of explosives placed at the entrance. So great was the damage there that he caught a glimpse of the street beyond and two forms fleeing the arena. Was that what had given Lucy Gray pause before she came to his aid? The possibility of escape? Other tributes had surely availed themselves of the opportunity. Yes, he heard the sirens now, the shouts from the street.

Medics picked their way over the rubble and ran for the wounded. “It’s okay,” he told Lucy Gray. “Help is here.” Hands reached for him, settled him onto a stretcher. He released her ruffles, thinking there would be another stretcher for her, but as they carried him off, he could see a Peacekeeper force her to her stomach and jam the barrel of a gun into her neck, yelling a string of profanities at her. “Lucy Gray!” Coriolanus cried out. No one paid any attention to him.

The blow to his head made concentration hard, but he was aware of the ambulance ride, banging through the doors to the same waiting area where he’d drunk his fizzy lemon soda just a day before, and then being moved onto a table under a bright light while a team of doctors tried to assess the damage. He wanted to sleep, but they kept pushing their faces into his and demanding answers, their stale lunch breath making him queasy again. Into machines, out of machines, needles jabbing him, and finally, blissfully, being allowed to drift off. Periodically throughout the night, someone would wake him and shine lights in his eyes. As long as he could answer a few basic questions, they let him fall back into oblivion.

When he finally woke, really woke, on Sunday, the light through the window said afternoon, and the Grandma’am and Tigris were leaning over him with worried looks. He felt a warm reassurance. I’m not alone, he thought. I’m not in the arena. I’m safe.

“Hi, Coryo,” said Tigris. “It’s us.”

“Hello.” He attempted a smile. “You missed bomb time.”

“Turns out it’s worse than being there,” said Tigris, “knowing you were going through it all alone.”

“I wasn’t alone,” he said. The morphling and the concussion made it hard to recall things clearly. “Lucy Gray was there. She saved my life, I think.” He couldn’t quite get his mind around the idea. Sweet, but unsettling, too.

Tigris gave his hand a squeeze. “I’m not surprised. She’s obviously a good person. Right from the beginning, she tried to protect you from the other tributes.”

The Grandma’am needed more convincing. After he’d patched together a time line of the bombing for her, she came to this conclusion: “Well, like as not she decided the Peacekeepers would gun her down if she ran, but still, it shows some character. Perhaps, as she claims, she is not really district.”

High praise indeed, or as high as the Grandma’am was likely to muster.

As Tigris filled him in on the details he had missed, he realized how on edge this event had made the Capitol. What had happened — at least what the Capitol News claimed had happened — frightened citizens with both its immediate fallout and its ramifications for the future. They didn’t know who had set the bombs — rebels, yes, but from where? They could’ve been from any of the twelve districts, or a ragtag bunch that had escaped from District 13, or even, fate forbid, some long-dormant cell in the Capitol itself. The time line for the crime was baffling. Since the arena stood empty, locked, and ignored between Hunger Games, the bombs could’ve been placed six days or six months before. Security cameras covered the entrances around the oval, but the crumbling exterior made scaling the structure possible. They didn’t even know if the bombs had been triggered remotely or by a false step, but the unexpected losses shook the Capitol to its core. That the two tributes from District 6 had been killed by shrapnel caused little concern, but the same explosion had taken the lives of the Ring twins. Three mentors had been hospitalized — Coriolanus, and Androcles Anderson and Gaius Breen, who’d been assigned the District 9 tributes. His two classmates were in critical condition, Gaius having lost both his legs, and almost everyone else, whether mentor, tribute, or Peacekeeper, had needed medical care of some sort.

Coriolanus felt bewildered. He’d genuinely liked Pollo and Didi, how they’d doted on each other, how upbeat they’d been. Somewhere nearby, Androcles, who aspired to be a reporter at Capitol News like his mother, and Gaius, a Citadel brat with an endless supply of terrible jokes, were barely hanging on to life.

“What about Lysistrata? Is she all right?” She’d been behind him.

The Grandma’am looked uncomfortable. “Oh, her. She’s fine. She’s going around saying that big, ugly boy from District Twelve protected her by throwing his body over her, but who knows? The Vickers family loves the spotlight.”

“Do they?” asked Coriolanus skeptically. He could not recall, not once, ever seeing a Vickers in the spotlight, except for a brief annual news conference in which they gave President Ravinstill a clean bill of health. Lysistrata was a self-contained, efficient person who never drew attention to herself. To even suggest she could be put in the same class as Arachne rubbed him the wrong way.

“She only made one quick statement to a reporter right after the bombing. I expect it was the truth, Grandma’am,” said Tigris. “Perhaps the people of District Twelve are not quite so bad as you paint them. Both Jessup and Lucy Gray have behaved bravely.”

“Have you seen Lucy Gray? On the television, I mean. Does she look all right?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Coryo. They haven’t shown any footage of the zoo. But she’s not on the list of the dead tributes,” said Tigris.

“Are there more? Than the ones from District Six?” Coriolanus didn’t want to sound morbid, but they were Lucy Gray’s competition.

“Yes, some others died after the bombing,” Tigris told him.

Both pairs from Districts 1 and 2 had made for the hole blown open near the entrance. The District 1 kids had been shot dead, the girl from 2 had made it to the river and leaped over the wall only to die in the fall, and Marcus had disappeared completely, leaving a desperate, dangerous, powerful boy loose somewhere in the city. A displaced manhole cover suggested that he might have climbed underground to the Transfer, the network of tracks and roadways built under the Capitol, but no one knew for sure.

“I suppose they see the arena as a symbol,” said the Grandma’am. “Just as they did during the war. The worst part is that it took almost twenty seconds before they cut the transmission to the districts, so no doubt it was a cause for celebration. Beasts that they are.”

“But they say hardly anyone in the districts saw it, Grandma’am,” Tigris countered. “The people there don’t like to watch the Hunger Games coverage.”

“It will only take a handful to get the word out,” said the Grandma’am. “It’s just the kind of story that catches fire.”

The doctor who’d talked to Coriolanus after the snake attack entered, introducing himself as Dr. Wane. He sent Tigris and the Grandma’am home and gave Coriolanus a quick checkup, explaining the nature of the concussion (fairly mild) and the burns, which were responding well to treatment. It would take some time to heal completely, but if he behaved himself and continued to improve, he’d be released in a couple of days.

“Do you know how my tribute is doing? Her hands were burned rather badly,” said Coriolanus. Each time he thought of her he felt a stab of uneasiness, but then the morphling would wrap around it like cotton wool.

“I wouldn’t know,” said the doctor. “But they’ve got a top-notch veterinarian over there. I expect she’ll be fine by the time they’ve got the Games up and running. But that’s not your concern, young man. Your concern is to get well, and for that, you need some sleep.”

Coriolanus was happy to oblige. He slipped back into sleep and didn’t fully come to until Monday morning. With his aching head and battered body, he felt in no rush to leave the hospital. The air-conditioning eased the burns on his skin, and generous portions of bland food appeared regularly. He caught up on the news on the large-screen television while he sipped as much fizzy lemon drink as he could hold. A double funeral was to be held for the Ring twins the following day. The manhunt for Marcus continued. Both the Capitol and the districts were under heightened security.

Three mentors dead, three hospitalized — really, four if you counted Clemensia. Six tributes dead, one escaped, several wounded. If Dr. Gaul wanted a makeover for the Hunger Games, she’d gotten it.

In the afternoon, the parade of visitors began with Festus, sporting a sling on his arm and a few stitches where a shard of metal had sliced his cheek. He said that the Academy had canceled classes, but the students were supposed to show up the next morning for the Rings’ funeral. He choked up at the mention of the twins, and Coriolanus wondered if he would have a more emotional response himself once they removed the morphling drip, which muted both pain and joy. Satyria popped in with some bakery cookies, relayed the well-wishes of the faculty, and told him that while the incident was unfortunate, it could only improve his chances for a prize. After a bit, an uninjured Sejanus appeared with Coriolanus’s book bag from the van and a stack of his mother’s delicious meat loaf sandwiches. He had little to say on the subject of his runaway tribute. Finally, Tigris came without the Grandma’am, who’d remained home to rest but had sent a clean uniform for him to wear on discharge. If there were cameras, she wanted him to look his best. They split the sandwiches and then Tigris stroked his aching head until he dozed off, just as she had when headaches plagued him as a child.

When someone awakened him in the wee hours of Tuesday, he supposed a nurse had come to check his vital signs, then started at the sight of Clemensia’s ravaged face above his. The snake venom, or the antidote perhaps, had left her golden brown skin peeling and the whites of her eyes the color of egg yolks. But much worse was the twitching that affected her entire body, causing her face to grimace, her tongue to jut periodically from her mouth, and her hands to jerk away even as they reached for his.

“Shh!” she hissed. “I shouldn’t be here. Don’t tell them I came. But what are they saying? Why has no one come to see me? Do my parents know what happened? Do they think I’m dead?”

Groggy from sleep and medication, Coriolanus couldn’t quite wrap his mind around what she was saying. “Your parents? But they’ve been here. I saw them.”

“No. No one has seen me!” she cried. “I have to get out of here, Coryo. I’m afraid she’s going to kill me. It’s not safe. We’re not safe!”

“What? Who’s going to kill you? You’re not talking sense,” he said.

“Dr. Gaul, of course!” She clutched his arm, awakening his burns. “You know, you were there!”

Coriolanus tried to free her fingers. “You need to go back to your room. You’re sick, Clemmie. It’s the snakebites. They’re making you imagine things.”

“Did I imagine this?” She ripped back the opening of her hospital gown to reveal a patch of skin that extended over her chest and down one shoulder. Mottled with bright blue, pink, and yellow scales, it had the reptilian quality of the snakes in the tank. When he gasped, she shrieked, “And it’s spreading! It’s spreading!”

Two of the hospital staff had her then, lifting her up and carrying her from the room. He lay awake the rest of the night, thinking of the snakes, and her skin, and the glass cases of Avoxes with their gruesome animal modifications in Dr. Gaul’s lab. Is that where Clemensia was headed? If not, why hadn’t her parents seen her? Why did no one except him seem to know what had happened? If Clemensia died, would he disappear as well, the only witness? Had he put Tigris at risk by telling her the story?

The pleasant cocoon of the hospital now seemed an insidious trap shrinking to suffocate him. No one checked on him as the hours crept by, which added to his distress. Finally, just as dawn was breaking, Dr. Wane appeared by his bedside. “I hear Clemensia visited you last night,” he said cheerfully. “Did she give you a scare?”

“A bit.” Coriolanus tried to appear nonchalant.

“She’ll be all right. The venom causes a lot of unusual side effects as it works itself out of the system. That’s why we haven’t let her parents see her. They think she’s quarantined with a highly contagious flu. She’ll be presentable in a day or two,” the doctor told him. “You can go visit her if you’re up to it. Might cheer her up.”

“All right,” said Coriolanus, slightly reassured. But he could not unsee what he’d seen, not at the hospital, and not at the lab. The removal of the morphling drip brought all the fuzzy edges into sharp relief. His suspicions tainted every comfort, from the large breakfast of hotcakes and bacon, to the basket of fresh fruit and sweets from the Academy, to the news that his performance of the anthem would be replayed for the Rings’ funeral, as both a mark of its quality and a nod to his own sacrifices.

The pre-funeral coverage started at seven, and by nine the student body again filled the stairs in front of the Academy. Just over a week ago, he’d felt he was falling into insignificance with his District 12 girl assignment, and now he was being honored for his courage in front of the entire nation. He’d expected them to show a tape of him singing, but instead his holographic self appeared behind the podium, and while it was a little watery at first, it settled into a clean, crisp image. People were always saying he resembled his handsome father more every day, but for the first time he could really see it. Not just the eyes but the jawline, the hair, the proud carriage. And Lucy Gray was right; his voice did have real authority. Overall, the performance was quite impressive.

The Capitol doubled the efforts made for Arachne’s funeral, which Coriolanus felt appropriate for the twins. More speeches, more Peacekeepers, more banners. He didn’t mind seeing the twins praised, even extravagantly, and wished they somehow could’ve known his hologram had opened the event. The dead tribute count had escalated, with the two tributes from District 9 having died from their injuries. Apparently, the veterinarian had done her best, but her repeated requests to admit them to the hospital had been refused. Their scarred bodies, along with what remained of the District 6 tributes, were draped over the backs of horses and paraded down Scholars Road. The two tributes from District 1 and the girl from District 2, as befitting their cowardly escape attempt, were dragged behind them. Then came a pair of those caged trucks Coriolanus had ridden in on his way to the zoo, one for the boys and one for the girls. He strained to see Lucy Gray but couldn’t locate her, which added to his worries. Was she lying inert on the floor, overcome by injuries and hunger?

As the twins’ matching silver coffins came into focus, all he could think of was this silly game they’d made up on the playground during the war called Ring-around-the-Rings. The rest of the kids would chase down Didi and Pollo and then grab hands, forming a circle around them and trapping them. It always ended with the whole lot of them, Rings included, laughing their heads off in a heap on the ground. Oh, to be seven again, in a happy pile with his friends, with nutritional crackers waiting at his desk.

After lunch, Dr. Wane said he could be released if he promised to stay calm and get bed rest, and as the charms of the hospital had diminished, he changed into his clean uniform at once. Tigris collected him and accompanied him home on the trolley, but then had to return to work. Both he and the Grandma’am spent the afternoon napping, and he awoke to a nice casserole Sejanus’s ma had sent over.

At Tigris’s urging he went to bed with the sun, but sleep eluded him. Every time he closed his eyes, he’d see the flames all around, feel the trembling of the earth, smell the choking black smoke. Lucy Gray had been nibbling around the edges of his thoughts, but now he could think of no one else. How was she? Healing and fed, or suffering and starving in that awful monkey house? While he had been lying in the air-conditioned hospital with his morphling drip, had the veterinarian attended to her hands? Had the smoke damaged that remarkable voice? In helping him, had she ruined her chances for sponsors in the arena? He felt some embarrassment when he thought of his terror under the beam, but even more so when he remembered what had followed. On Capitol TV, the coverage they’d shown of the bombing had been obscured by the smoke. But did it exist? Footage of her rescuing him and, much worse, of him clinging to her ruffled skirt as they waited for help to come?

His hand fumbled in the drawer of his nightstand and found his mother’s compact. As he inhaled the rose-scented powder, his thoughts quieted a bit, but restlessness drove him from his bed. For the next few hours, he wandered the apartment, looking out at the night sky, down at the Corso, into the neighbors’ windows across the way. At some point he found himself up on the roof amid the Grandma’am’s roses and didn’t remember having climbed the stairs to the garden. The fresh night air perfumed by the flowers helped, but soon brought on a bout of shivering that made everything hurt again.

Tigris found him sitting in the kitchen a few hours before dawn. She made tea and they ate the remainder of the casserole straight from the pan. The savory layers of meat, potato, and cheese consoled him, as did Tigris’s gentle reminder that the situation with Lucy Gray was not of his making. They were both, after all, still children whose lives were dictated by powers above them.

Somewhat comforted, he managed to doze for a few hours before a phone call from Satyria woke him. She encouraged him to attend school that morning if he could manage. Another mentor-tribute meeting had been scheduled with the idea of working toward the interviews, which would now be on a completely voluntary basis.

Later at the Academy, as he looked down from the balcony into Heavensbee Hall, the empty chairs rattled him. He knew, in his head, that eight tributes had died, that one was missing, but he’d not envisioned how that would ripple through the pattern of the twenty-four little tables, leaving a jagged, disconcerting mess. No tributes at all from Districts 1, 2, 6, or 9, and only one from 10. Most of the kids who remained were injured, and all looked unwell. As the mentors joined their assignees, the losses became even more pronounced. Six mentors were either dead or hospitalized, and those partnered with the escapees of Districts 1 and 2 had no tributes at their tables and therefore no reason to show up. Livia Cardew had been vocal about this turn of events, demanding new tributes be brought from the districts, or at least that she be given Reaper, the boy assigned to Clemensia, who everyone thought had been hospitalized with the flu. Her wishes had not been accommodated, and Reaper sat alone at his table, a bandage stained with rusty dried blood wrapped around his head.

As Coriolanus took the seat opposite her, Lucy Gray didn’t even attempt a smile. A ragged cough racked her chest, and soot from the fire still clung to her clothing. The veterinarian had exceeded Coriolanus’s expectations, though, as the skin on her hands was healing nicely.

“Hi,” he said, scooting a nut butter sandwich and two of Satyria’s cookies across the table.

“Hey,” she said hoarsely. Any attempt at flirtation or even camaraderie had been abandoned. She patted the sandwich but seemed too tired to eat it. “Thanks.”

“No, thank you for saving my life.” He said it lightly, but as he gazed into her eyes, the levity leached away.

“Is that what you’re telling people?” she asked. “That I saved your life?”

He had said as much to Tigris and the Grandma’am and then, perhaps unsure what to do with the information, let it drift from his thoughts like a dream. Now, with the empty seats of the fallen around them, the memory of how she’d rescued him in the arena demanded his attention, and he could not ignore its significance. If Lucy Gray had not helped him, he would be utterly, irrevocably dead. Another shiny coffin dripping flowers. Another empty chair. When he spoke again, the words caught in his throat before he forced them out. “I told my family. Really. Thank you, Lucy Gray.”

“Well, I had some time on my hands,” she said, tracing the frosted flower on a cookie with a shaky forefinger. “Pretty cookies.”

Then came confusion. If she had saved his life, he owed her, what? A sandwich and two cookies? That was how he was repaying her. For his life. Which apparently he held quite cheaply. The truth was, he owed her everything. He felt the blush burn over his cheeks. “You could have run. And if you had, I would have gone up in flames before they reached me.”

“Run, huh? Seemed like a lot of effort to get shot,” she said.

Coriolanus shook his head. “You can joke, but it won’t change what you did for me. I hope I can repay you in some way.”

“I hope so, too,” she said.

In those few words he sensed a shift in their dynamic. As her mentor, he’d been the gracious giver of gifts, always to be met with gratitude. Now she’d upended things by giving him a gift beyond compare. On the surface, everything looked the same. Chained girl, boy offering food, Peacekeepers guarding that status quo. But deep down, things could never be the same between them. He would always be in her debt. She had the right to demand things.

“I don’t know how,” he admitted.

Lucy Gray glanced around the room, taking in her wounded competitors. Then she looked him in the eye, and impatience tinged her voice. “You could start by thinking I can actually win.”