“Tick, tock,” Wiress says in her sleep. As the lightning ceases and the blood rain begins just to the right of it, her words suddenly make sense.
“Oh,” I say under my breath. “Tick, tock.” My eyes sweep around the full circle of the arena and I know she's right. “Tick, tock. This is a clock.”
23
A clock. I can almost see the hands ticking around the twelve-sectioned face of the arena. Each hour begins a new horror, a new Gamemaker weapon, and ends the previous. Lightning, blood rain, fog, monkeys — those are the first four hours on the clock. And at ten, the wave. I don't know what happens in the other seven, but I know Wiress is right.
At present, the blood rain's falling and we're on the beach below the monkey segment, far too close to the fog for my liking. Do the various attacks stay within the confines of the jungle? Not necessarily. The wave didn't. If that fog leaches out of the jungle, or the monkeys return…
“Get up,” I order, shaking Peeta and Finnick and Johanna awake. “Get up—we have to move.” There's enough time, though, to explain the clock theory to them. About Wiress's tick-tocking and how the movements of the invisible hands trigger a deadly force in each section.
I think I've convinced everyone who's conscious except Johanna, who's naturally opposed to liking anything I suggest. But even she agrees it's better to be safe than sorry.
While the others collect our few possessions and get Beetee back into his jumpsuit, I rouse Wiress. She awakes with a panicked “tick, tock!”
“Yes, tick, tock, the arena's a clock. It's a clock, Wiress, you were right,” I say. “You were right.”
Relief floods her face — I guess because somebody has finally understood what she's known probably from the first tolling of the bells. “Midnight.”
“It starts at midnight,” I confirm.
A memory struggles to surface in my brain. I see a clock. No, it's a watch, resting in Plutarch Heavensbee's palm. “It starts at midnight,” Plutarch said. And then my mockingjay lit up briefly and vanished. In retrospect, it's like he was giving me a clue about the arena. But why would he? At the time, I was no more a tribute in these Games than he was. Maybe he thought it would help me as a mentor. Or maybe this had been the plan all along.
Wiress nods at the blood rain. “One-thirty,” she says.
“Exactly. One-thirty. And at two, a terrible poisonous fog begins there,” I say, pointing at the nearby jungle. “So we have to move somewhere safe now.” She smiles and stands up obediently. “Are you thirsty?” I hand her the woven bowl and she gulps down about a quart. Finnick gives her the last bit of bread and she gnaws on it. With the inability to communicate overcome, she's functioning again.
I check my weapons. Tie up the spile and the tube of medicine in the parachute and fix it to my belt with vine.
Beetee's still pretty out of it, but when Peeta tries to lift him, he objects. “Wire,” he says.
“She's right here,” Peeta tells him. “Wiress is fine. She's coming, too.”
But still Beetee struggles. “Wire,” he insists.
“Oh, I know what he wants,” says Johanna impatiently. She crosses the beach and picks up the cylinder we took from his belt when we were bathing him. It's coated in a thick layer of congealed blood. “This worthless thing. It's some kind of wire or something. That's how he got cut. Running up to the Cornucopia to get this. I don't know what kind of weapon it's supposed to be. I guess you could pull off a piece and use it as a garrote or something. But really, can you imagine Beetee garroting somebody?”
“He won his Games with wire. Setting up that electrical trap,” says Peeta. “It's the best weapon he could have.”
There's something odd about Johanna not putting this together. Something that doesn't quite ring true. Suspicious. “Seems like you'd have figured that out,” I say. “Since you nicknamed him Volts and all.”
Johanna's eyes narrow at me dangerously. “Yeah, that was really stupid of me, wasn't it?” she says. “I guess I must have been distracted by keeping your little friends alive. While you were… what, again? Getting Mags killed off?”
My fingers tighten on the knife handle at my belt.
“Go ahead. Try it. I don't care if you are knocked up, I'll rip your throat out,” says Johanna.
I know I can't kill her right now. But it's just a matter of time with Johanna and me. Before one of us offs the other.
“Maybe we all had better be careful where we step,” says Finnick, shooting me a look. He takes the coil and sets it on Beetee's chest. “There's your wire, Volts. Watch where you plug it.”
Peeta picks up the now-unresisting Beetee. “Where to?”
“I'd like to go to the Cornucopia and watch. Just to make sure we're right about the clock,” says Finnick. It seems as good a plan as any. Besides, I wouldn't mind the chance of going over the weapons again. And there are six of us now. Even if you count Beetee and Wiress out, we've got four good fighters. It's so different from where I was last year at this point, doing everything on my own. Yes, it's great to have allies as long as you can ignore the thought that you'll have to kill them.
Beetee and Wiress will probably find some way to die on their own. If we have to run from something, how far would they get? Johanna, frankly, I could easily kill if it came down to protecting Peeta. Or maybe even just to shut her up. What I really need is for someone to take out Finnick for me, since I don't think I can do it personally. Not after all he's done for Peeta. I think about maneuvering him into some kind of encounter with the Careers. It's cold, I know. But what are my options? Now that we know about the clock, he probably won't die in the jungle, so someone's going to have to kill him in battle.
Because this is so repellent to think about, my mind frantically tries to change topics. But the only thing that distracts me from my current situation is fantasizing about killing President Snow. Not very pretty daydreams for a seventeen-year-old girl, I guess, but very satisfying.
We walk down the nearest sand strip, approaching the Cornucopia with care, just in case the Careers are concealed there. I doubt they are, because we've been on the beach for hours and there's been no sign of life. The area's abandoned, as I expected. Only the big golden horn and the picked-over pile of weapons remain.
When Peeta lays Beetee in the bit of shade the Cornucopia provides, he calls out to Wiress. She crouches beside him and he puts the coil of wire in her hands. “Clean it, will you?” he asks.
Wiress nods and scampers over to the water's edge, where she dunks the coil in the water. She starts quietly singing some funny little song, about a mouse running up a clock. It must be for children, but it seems to make her happy.
“Oh, not the song again,” says Johanna, rolling her eyes. “That went on for hours before she started tick-tocking.”
Suddenly Wiress stands up very straight and points to the jungle. “Two,” she says.
I follow her finger to where the wall of fog has just begun to seep out onto the beach. “Yes, look, Wiress is right. It's two o'clock and the fog has started.”
“Like clockwork,” says Peeta. “You were very smart to figure that out, Wiress.”
Wiress smiles and goes back to singing and dunking her coil. “Oh, she's more than smart,” says Beetee. “She's intuitive.” We all turn to look at Beetee, who seems to be coming back to life. “She can sense things before anyone else. Like a canary in one of your coal mines.”