the capitol prison
tw: torture, suicidal ideation, suicide attempt (kind of? but please err on the side of caution), near death experience, depression, mental break, graphic violence
johanna's pov
There’s some kind of sonic boom above us, and I look up to see the sky falling.
Big chunks of metal start cascading down across the arena, revealing the real sky behind the Gamemakers’ manipulated version. Someone actually managed to take down the forcefield, I guess. Leave it to Volts to work that one out.
I quickly turn my attention back to Enobaria, hoping that what just happened might be enough for her to give up fighting us, but instead I watch as Cole slams his spear into the side of her head with a sickening thud. Her knees buckle and she falls to the ground, motionless.
“Do you…,” Cole says, gasping for air, “do you think she’s dead?”
I glance down at her. “I don’t know. But we shouldn’t wait around and find out. Come on.” I grab him by the arm and pull him toward the lightning tree, then take off running.
“What the hell just happened?” he calls after me. “I mean…what happened to the forcefield?”
“I don’t know! Hurry up!”
A hovercraft starts to descend over the lightning tree, already sending down the claw they use to pick up bodies. We’re still too far away to see who they have, but I watch as the claw retrieves three people, one by one. Katniss, Finnick, Beetee…they’re alive. We’re about to reach the tree when the hovercraft pulls up sharply and disappears.
“What the fuck?” I shout. We’re at the tree now, and I can see the wire wrapped around it, singed but not burnt up. “STOP! COME BACK!”
“Who was that? The Capitol?”
“No, you fucking dumbass!” I snap, throwing my ax at the tree in frustration. “District 13!”
Cole stares at me, and I start to realize the situation we’re in. They left us behind in the jungle. Me and this kid, and possibly Enobaria if she’s still breathing. I start to feel bad for him, but mostly I start to freak out for myself. Because how the hell am I supposed to get out of this one alive?
Deciding that now’s as good a time to let him in on the plan as ever, I take a deep breath and say, “Haymitch had a plan to get us all out, to get us to District—”
But my voice is suddenly drowned out by the sound of a hovercraft. They must have come back for us, realized that we were still alive. I grab Cole by the wrist and start waving at it, feeling hope replace the heartbreak I felt a moment ago as we scream until the claw appears.
Then we’re rising, and I’m imagining the feeling of collapsing into Katniss’s arms, holding her as tightly as I can because we’re finally safe. We might actually get to live our lives in 13, far away from Snow and the Games. I can hardly contain myself as we’re pulled into the hovercraft, my cheeks already hurting from smiling.
But I don’t see Katniss waiting for me.
I barely even process the Peacekeepers in front of me before I’m injected with something.
I wake up in a pristine white room. I’m sitting in a metal chair in the center with my arms and legs tied down. It hits me that this is a room I remember: this is where they bring the tributes to meet their stylists. I haven’t been back here since before my Games, but the memories wash over me anyways.
I was 15. Torn from my family. Trying to get used to the fact that I was about to die, but still fighting it. And now I’m 19 and somehow in an even more hopeless situation.
How the fuck am I going to get out of here?
The door creaks open, and my heart starts pounding at the sight of him: President Snow, dressed in a suit, smiling at me. “Welcome back, Miss Mason.”
“Fuck you.”
He chuckles and steps toward me, sighing as an Avox provides a chair for him. From up close, he looks like he’s aged. Hopefully he has, and he’ll die in a few days so this can all be over. “I’ll admit, I’m not very interested in wasting my time with diplomacy. I doubt you’d take it seriously in any case, so why bother?”
I scoff. At least he’s self aware.
“So I will ask you this one time, and one time only. Where are the other victors?”
If he’s asking, that means he doesn’t know where they are. It’s comforting, just a little bit. Even if they didn’t make it to 13, even if something went wrong, at least they’re safe from Snow. I smile back at him. “Did you check up your ass? There’s a lot of room up there, from what I’ve heard.”
He scowls at me. “Where have they taken Katniss Everdeen?”
“She’s alive?”
“You tell me.”
She has to be alive. If the first hovercraft was really Haymitch and the others, then she has to be. “Look, I don’t know where she is, and if I did, I still wouldn’t tell you.”
“I saw the kiss,” he declares matter-of-factly. He barely shows any sort of reaction, but it still feels like someone dropped a brick down my throat. “Oh, don’t worry, the broadcast didn’t show it. Your secret’s safe with me.”
“There’s no secret. I was just…saying goodbye to my friend,” I lie, knowing there’s no way he’ll believe it.
“I’m not sure the rest of Panem would see it that way,” he sneers.
“Show it to them. I don’t give a fuck.” That’s sort of another lie. I’d rather not have the whole country know that I kissed Katniss, but if it happens, I’ll find a way to deal with it.
Realizing that that didn’t work, he shifts gears and menacingly leans toward me again, so close that I can smell the mix of roses and blood. “If you ever want to see Katniss Everdeen again, you’ll tell me everything you know about the rebel plans. Otherwise, I’ll be perfectly happy to execute you both. Your choice.”
“Doesn’t seem like much of a choice.”
“I suppose it isn’t.”
“Then you already know my answer. No fucking way.”
A thin smile spreads across his face. He crosses his arms in front of him and continues, “Miss Mason, while I revere your stubborn dedication to challenging me, I must ask…why are you still fighting? You’re trapped here, alone, and no one is coming to save you. You’ve lost everything. So why is it that you still care about protecting the rebellion? You have nothing to gain from it.”
“Yep. So you might as well just leave me here to rot,” I reply casually.
“Perhaps I will. But first, I’ll give you one last chance. Where is Katniss Everdeen?”
He’s right about one thing: I have nothing left to lose. So I lean forward and spit in his face as hard as I can. It hits him square between the eyes and he recoils a bit, wiping it off and shaking his hand with disgust. He sneers at me, then leaves without another word.
I’m alone.
“Only you can make this world seem right. Only you can make the darkness bright.”
I’m not sure how long it’s been since Cole and I arrived here, but I think that they brought Annie Cresta a few days later. The singing started almost immediately. She sings the same song over and over again, only taking breaks to sleep and eat. I mean, I knew she was crazy, but something about this place has really broken her.
And I can’t say I blame her.
“Only you and you alone can thrill me like you do and fill my heart with love for only you.”
The walls are too thin. I can hear absolutely everything that Annie and Cole do or say. The first few nights, I heard him crying himself to sleep. The singing blocks out a lot now, but sometimes I still hear him muttering to himself. And I hear when they torture him. Every single sound.
“Oh, only you can make all this change in me. For it’s true, you are my destiny.”
The torturing didn’t begin right away, surprisingly. They gave us a few days, I think because they wanted to make sure we didn’t die from our arena injuries. My arm was bad for a while from the cuts Enobaria made, but they gave me some kind of cream and stitched up the second stab wound. Still, it left a pair of scars that I can’t bring myself to look at.
“When you hold my hand, I understand the magic that you do. You’re my dream come true, my one and only you.”
Once my arm was healed, they started it. Sometimes, they strap me down to a metal bed and cover my face with a cloth, pouring water on my face until I almost pass out. Other times, they flood the room and send electric currents through the water, shocking me. I can’t move, can’t do anything as the water rises around me.
“Oh, only you can make all this change in me. For it’s true, you are my destiny.”
The first time they shocked me, they used too much electricity. I woke up on the ground with a doctor hovering over me, holding these paddles that I once saw them use on an older Victor when his heart stopped at a Capitol party. As soon as I opened my eyes, the doctor ordered the Peacekeepers to put me back in the chair. I tried to fight them, but I didn’t even have enough strength to stand on my own. At least they left me alone for the rest of the day, so I guess my almost-death had a silver lining.
“When you hold my hand, I understand the magic that you do. You’re my dream come true, my one and only you.”
I had always wondered what happens after we die. What someone sees, where they go. But there was nothing. Just darkness. One moment I was gasping for air, and the next moment I wasn’t. And then I was lying on the ground, face to face with the Capitol doctor who might have been the person that had just killed me. It happened so quickly that I didn't even have time to watch my life flash before my eyes.
Annie is silent for a moment. Every time, I think that this is the last time, that she’s finally going to be done with this ridiculous fucking song. But she takes a deep breath and continues, just like always.
“Only you can make this world seem right. Only you can make the darkness bright.”
“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” I snap, screaming so loud that my frail body shakes in the chair. “I MEAN IT, I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE! STOP!”
I’m actually surprised that she listens. The silence feels weird after all this time. I sigh and almost feel bad for yelling at her. It’s not her fault that we’re in here, after all, but I really can’t keep listening to that song.
“Johanna?” Cole asks. He sounds so much weaker. We don’t talk much, but then again, it’s hard to talk over the singing.
“What?”
He pauses for a moment. “Do you think we’ll get out of here?”
“I…,” I can’t have this conversation with him. I can’t even have this conversation with myself, because I don’t want to think about what happens if we don’t make it out. “I hope so.”
“You know, I thought about killing myself after the Games. Part of me wishes I had. But I thought, ‘Santhe would be so angry with me if I died,’ y’know?” He chuckles painfully. “Because she did die. She died so that I could live. So I couldn’t just throw my life away like that…”
I get the sense that he’s not really talking to me. He’s just talking to talk, to fill the silence the way that Annie usually does. And at the end of the day, he has to know that Santhe’s death wasn’t some kind of noble sacrifice. Snow ordered the Gamemakers to shoot her, so she died. The same way that he probably ordered the avalanche that killed my tributes.
“But now…,” Cole continues, oblivious to the fact that I really don’t care about listening to him, “now I think maybe I should’ve just done it. Maybe it would’ve been better that way. I wouldn’t have ended up back in the arena and I wouldn’t be here.”
“Don’t say that,” I hear myself reply. “Isn’t there someone else that you love that’s alive? Someone who wants you to live?”
“Santhe was the love of my life,” he says dramatically.
“And you just said she’d never forgive you for killing yourself. So, you know…don’t kill yourself.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“No problem,” I reply sarcastically.
A long silence falls between us. I wait for Annie to take it as her cue for an encore, but she doesn’t. I wonder if she’s even still in her room.
“There’s one other person,” Cole finally says. “I don’t love her, but she’s nice.”
“Well, then maybe she’s the new love of your life,” I reply dryly.
“Prim? No way. She’s way younger than me, and she’s…well, she’s Primrose Everdeen. She’s my friend, but—”
“Wait, stop. Katniss’s sister?”
“Yeah.”
I can’t help but laugh aloud. “Good luck with that.”
“I just said I’m not in love with her.”
“Keep it that way. Trust me.” As someone who might be falling in love with an Everdeen myself, I really can’t stress enough how much of a losing game it is. Plus, he has no idea how quickly Katniss would end his life if he messed around with Prim.
“She’s just my friend,” he sighs. “You know, at first I thought she was kind of annoying. But she’s actually really kind. And funny. And…she has this laugh that just makes you wanna laugh along with her no matter how sad you really are. I needed that when I met her.”
Against my own will, I think back to being mentors with Katniss. How she made me forget all my feelings about the Games and laugh. I smile to myself as I picture the time she brought me coffee after my tributes died. I can see her sitting on that tree stump in the arena, laughing and making fun of me. It makes me feel better, just for a second, but then I miss her so bad that it physically hurts.
“What about you? Who—oh, shit. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I sigh. “Sometimes I forget too.”
“Really?”
“Now that it’s been a couple years, yeah. It takes me a minute to remember what happened. Like, I’ll think of my mom, y’know, and then I’ll think about the fact that she’s dead.”
Cole’s silent for a moment, and I wish I hadn’t said anything. “I know it’s not really my place, but…is there really no one you love who’s still alive? Or were you exaggerating when you said that in the Games?”
I know that Snow could be listening in on us and I can’t believe I’m about to share this with Cole of all people, but it might feel good to talk about it before I die. “Actually, there’s one person.”
“Who?”
“Nope.”
“Come on, tell me. It’s not like I’m gonna tell them. Even if we get out of here.”
“No way.”
“At least describe them? Seriously. I need something else to think about. I…I’m going crazy in here.”
Reluctantly, I try to think of what I can tell him that won’t give it completely away. “Well, they’re…tall. And their face is…nice.”
“Nice?” he repeats skeptically.
“Yeah. They have a nice face.”
“Dude, do you even actually like them?”
“You know what? Shut up,” I scoff. “What do you want me to say? That they’re tall and attractive and I get butterflies when I look at them?”
“Doyou get butterflies when you look at them?” he jokes.
I laugh in spite of myself. “No…maybe, whatever. Fuck you, that’s not even important.”
“What do you like about them?”
I think about it for a moment. “They’re funny. And smarter than people give them credit for, but also so stupid sometimes. And they listen when it matters but they also never hold back what they’re thinking. They care about almost everyone they meet. And they just…they get me. They get me in a way that nobody’s gotten me since…like, ever.”
It does feel good to talk about. It makes me miss Katniss like hell, but it’s nice to think about her instead of everything that’s happening around me here.
“I hope you get to see them again,” Cole says quietly.
“Yeah…me too.”
“Finnick gets me,” Annie chimes in suddenly. “He gets me like they get you. We don’t get to meet many people like that. People who understand us.”
She’s right, I guess. It’s probably the only thing she’s ever said that makes sense to me.
“I hope you get to see Finnick again too, Annie,” says Cole.
“I hope so,” Annie replies. And then she starts up the song again, which I guess means that we’re done talking about the people we love.
“I’m a man of my word, Miss Mason.”
I’m gasping for air after being tortured again, the darkness around my eyes fading away as my vision returns. I can barely see the man in front of me, but I recognize him by the stifling smell of roses that only makes it that much harder for me to catch my breath.
“You remember, of course, the promise I made you after your Victory Tour?” asks President Snow, his snakelike eyes gleaming as he takes a step toward me. He grabs me by my chin, forcing me to look at him as he murmurs, “I promised that I would destroy everyone you’ve ever loved. Unless you learned to fall in line.” He releases me with a shove and steps backward. “So I’m going to give you one final opportunity. Where is the Mockingjay?”
“Fuck,” I wheeze, “you.”
“I suppose you’ve made your choice. As it stands, I’ve already given the order to bomb District 13 tonight. There is nothing anyone can do to stop it. In a few hours, the people of Districts 12 and 13 will be reduced to ashes and Katniss Everdeen will be dead. You’ve lost, Miss Mason. Once again, your disobedience has cost you everything.”
He turns to leave. I summon the last bit of fight I have left and shout at his back, “You’re delusional if you think the revolution will die with Katniss! We’ll just fight harder!”
He turns around slowly, considering me with a mix of disgust and amusement.
“Don’t you get it? We’ll never stop fighting you!”
“We’ll see about that,” he answers, then closes the door with a slam.
As soon as he’s gone, I burst into tears. Katniss is going to die. She’s going to die tonight, and there’s nothing I can do to save her. After tonight, I’ll be completely alone again. Maybe I’ll get lucky and they’ll decide to finally kill me too, because I don’t know how I’m going to live in a world where Katniss Everdeen is dead.
I hear a door open nearby. They’re probably taking Cole for another interview with Caesar. They’ve been doing that a lot recently, using him to try to convince people to stop fighting. Every time they interview him, I see it on the TV in my room. It’s the only thing that ever plays. I think they want me to see him getting worse.
Sure enough, the TV clicks on later. He looks like he’s already dead. Caesar asks him the routine questions, and it’s basically the same thing I watched the last time, except for when he looks straight at the camera. He never does that.
“Katniss, you have no idea what this war will cost us. They’re gonna kill everyone, and in District 13 you’ll be dead by morning—”
The broadcast cuts out completely. The TV shows the Capitol seal for a few minutes, then goes blank. I sit there, processing it, until I hear them returning Cole to his room. Someone starts beating him. He’s grunting and groaning with every hit, and then it stops as suddenly as it started.
“Show me,” I hear the cold voice of President Snow say next door, “Prove to me that it will work.”
“Yes sir,” someone answers.
Then I hear agonizing screams and loud thumping noises. I don’t know what they’re doing to him over there, but it’s so horrible that it takes my breath away and I feel myself start to sob. The thumping stops, but I can still hear Cole crying.
“Excellent. And you believe that the effect will hold over time?”
“Absolutely, sir, as long as we continue the treatments consistently for as long as we can. We’ve had phenomenal results in our animal trials.”
“Good. Carry on, then. I expect regular updates. And remember, he must be ready in time for his removal.”
The way he says it chills me to the bone. Removal. Is he going to kill us? Or bring us somewhere and leave us for dead? I don’t want to find out. I start to shake uncontrollably, terrified for myself and terrified for Katniss, because even now that they know the bombs are coming, District 13 might still be leveled overnight.
A few days later, the TV clicks on.
For a moment, I think I’m hallucinating. They’ve amped up the torture for us ever since Cole’s last interview, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I was. But there she is, standing in front of a burning building, looking just the way I remember her.
“I want the rebels to know that I’m alive,” she shouts at the camera, “that I’m here in District 8 where the Capitol has just bombed a hospital full of unarmed men, women, and children. There will be no survivors.”
I don’t blink the entire time that Katniss is on the screen, drinking up the sight of her, trying to figure out everything I can about how she’s doing. She’s gone too quickly, cut out by a Capitol broadcast fighting for control of the air. But it’s enough for me to see her, to know that she’s out there. For the first moment since I arrived back in the Capitol, I feel hopeful.
From that moment on, I stare at the TV constantly. But Katniss never comes back. I tell myself that it’s because Snow probably had the TV disconnected, not because something happened to her. I tell myself that if she’s out there fighting, then she must be trying to save me. That the rebels will come and rescue us soon.
Then one day, the Peacekeepers shave my head.
At first, I thought it was just to dehumanize me, and it works in that sense. I watch my hair fall to the ground in clumps, knowing that I must look horrifying. It even makes it hard to think about Katniss rescuing me, because I don’t want her to see me like this.
But then, a pair of Peacekeepers bring in a massive metal contraption that locks my head in place. I can’t move at all. I have no choice but to stare straight ahead. If I shut my eyes, the contraption burns me so badly that I think I might be dying. I realize they must have shaved my head for this.
They roll in a new TV, one that must not be connected to the Capitol broadcast network and therefore not at risk of accidentally showing me rebel propaganda. And they make me watch horrible things. Torture footage of Cole, Annie, rebels, and Avoxes. Old game footage of the tributes I mentored. My own Games.
That all pales in comparison to the worst thing they show me: a video of my family’s deaths. A video I didn’t know existed, and I wish I never had to see. It’s the thing that makes me finally snap. I don’t care if I live or die. I don’t care about anything. I scream until I can’t speak anymore. I cry until my head hurts and I can’t see, which is my only shred of relief. Watching it hurts so badly that I finally shut my eyes in protest, accepting the burn of the contraption and hoping it kills me. That’s when they reluctantly shut it off, remove it, and go back to the water torture.
I start to wonder if anyone’s coming to save me after all.
And then, in the middle of the night, I wake up to a group of people in black uniforms barging into my room. They’re all holding guns and wearing gas masks over their faces, but I know they’re not Snow’s people because they’re not wearing Peacekeeper uniforms. Two of them bend down to my chair and start to undo my restraints.
“It’s ok,” the man to my left says. I can see his gray eyes through the visor on his mask. He almost looks like Katniss, and his accent sounds like hers. “We’re here to help you.”
“You’re from 12? Is Katniss ok?”
“She’s fine,” he replies. “She’s in 13. Come on, there’s no time—can you walk?”
All my appreciation for this guy goes straight out the window. “Of course I can fucking walk, asshole,” I snap at him, ignoring the arm he offers and using my chair to push myself to my feet.
But when I try to take a step, I realize he has a point. It’s exhausting for me to even stand, since I’ve only been allowed out of the chair a few times in however long it's been. I almost pass out, stumbling into the soldiers and falling to the ground.
The first soldier, the guy from 12, picks me up. At least he has the good sense not to say anything stupid and make this more humiliating than it already is. He carries me out to the entrance, where we wait for the rest of the team to extract Annie and Cole. Then we enter a hovercraft, and we’re off to District 13. I’m expecting the Capitol to try to fight, to shoot us down out of the sky, but we make it out of their airspace without a single threat.
The man from 12 sits next to me and offers some kind of dehydrated snack bar. I accept it and eat the whole thing so quickly that I barely taste it at all, so he sneaks me another one out of a sleeping soldier’s pocket.
“Thanks,” I say.
“No problem. I know you’ve been through hell and back.”
“Understatement of the year.” I finish the second bar, but I start to wonder if it wasn’t the best idea for my stomach, especially since we’re in the air. “But anyways. What’s 13 like?”
His face hardens. “A means to an end.” I wait for him to elaborate, but all he says is, “It’s completely underground. Useful, but…not my favorite place.”
He must have been a miner, then. “What made you leave 12?”
“What?” He stares at me for a moment, then realizes something. “Oh, that’s right. You don’t know.”
“Know what?”
“After you guys blew up the arena, they started dropping fire bombs,” he says quietly. “A group of us barely made it out. But 12’s gone. Obliterated.”
“Damn. I’m sorry,” I say uncomfortably. Then I blurt out, “What about Katniss’s sister?”
“She made it. I got her and her mom out in time. They’re both in 13.”
I sigh in relief. “Good.”
The man stares at me, thinking to himself. After a while, he says, “You must really care about her.”
“Katniss?” I shift in my seat awkwardly. “Yeah.”
“Hmm. I guess I thought…well, people thought you were just acting to get her to trust you. For the rebellion.”
“Seriously? She’s…my friend. We mentored together before the Quell, before the rebellion was even a real thing,” I say defensively. “I’d die for her. I almost did.”
“So would I,” he murmurs. “So would a lot of people. But…not everyone would ask about her and her family before anything else, before they even left that torture chamber.”
“I’m not like everyone else. She’s not Katniss Everdeen to me, she’s just Katniss.”
“Good, then. She needs more people like us. She deserves it.”
I wonder if this guy might be Gale, Katniss’s old hunting partner and “cousin.” His uniform has a patch on his chest that says Hawthorne, but I can’t remember if Katniss ever told me Gale’s last name. But the more I think about it, he does look a lot like the photo that was in the locket I wore. I’m about to ask him when someone announces that we’ve arrived at 13.