Filed To Story: Sunrise on the Reaping Book PDF Free
“That’s a great comfort to me. Thank you.” He wipes his glasses and settles them firmly back in place. “So, do you know how to use explosives?”
Oddly enough, I do a bit. We have classes in coal produc-tion. Dull as dust usually. But since we’re the future miners of Panem, they do show us how coal gets mined, which can involve placing explosives in a hole in the rock, inserting a blasting cap with a length of fuse attached, and then lighting it. We practice this with fake stuff. Inert, they call it. The real stuff can kill you.
“I know the basics,” I say. “For the coal mines. But where am I going to get the fuse and -“
“We’re working that out now. How to smuggle the materials past security. But unlike the components used in your mines, which as I’m sure you know can be deadly, I have specifically designed these to be safe. Both chemically and structurally. They cannot be set off unintentionally by you or anything else. To set them off, you will need to fully assemble the bomb correctly and light the fuse with fire.”
That makes me a little calmer. I don’t need a blasting cap exploding on me before it’s time to blow a hole in the tank. My fingers find my flint striker. Lenore Dove’s voice floats in from the Meadow.
“Only you don’t have to have flint. Any decent sparking rock like quartz will do.”
“Will there be rocks in there, do you think? Flint or quartz?” I ask.
“Possibly. I can try to find out. Why?”
“If there are, I can handle that last one.” I lift my chin and display my gift. “Flint striker.”
Beetee looks impressed. “Very clever. Never underestimate Twelve, as I always say.”
“You do?” Be nice if someone said something approving about us for a change.
“I do. You don’t think like the rest of us. You’ve done a better job of holding on to yourselves, despite the Capitol.”
“They think we’re animals, so that helps.”
Wiress appears, startling us. “You better finish. A repair crew just pulled up out front. It could be any time now.”
“More to come. Don’t tell anyone what we’ve discussed.” Beetee vanishes in the dark.
“Best get to bed,” Wiress instructs me.
I return to my watch in the bedroom. After a few minutes, the power surges back with a gush of chilled air and a constellation of lights. A jumble of Beetee’s instructions fills my brain. What did I just agree to? Mutt portal . . . bladder . . . explosives . . . ? How on earth am I going to pull that off? Doubt consumes me. Probably I should just be the fire maker and Ampert should set the explosives. But does he have the physical strength to manage the mutt portal and the climb? And what if I do pull it off? What if I break the arena?
How Lenore Dove would love it if she knew I’d bested the Capitol and stopped the Games, at least for this year. There’s glory in that. Dignity. And if I did it using her flint striker? It’d be like we did it together. Painted a poster that no one could ignore. Outsmarted the Capitol and forced their citizens to see us as something other than mindless animals.
“Haymitch?” Maysilee stirs. “I’ll take over now.”
“Okay, thanks.” She doesn’t sound drowsy. Either she woke with a start or she’s never been asleep.
“Everything all right?” she asks.
I wonder if she saw me leave and tried to overhear my conversation with Beetee, but I can’t talk about it. The fewer people who know about the plot, the better, and while I like her more in the Capitol than I did in 12, we’re not exactly confidants.
“Well, there was a power outage, but they seemed to have fixed it,” I tell her. “‘Night.” Curling up in my blankets, I pretend to drift off until I actually do.
In the morning, I find myself tempted to share Beetee’s plan with the others. Doesn’t feel honest not to. Lou Lou’s enough of a distraction to keep me from blurting it out. We decide the simplest way to manage her appearance is to pretend that while the Capitol miraculously managed to patch Louella up, she’s no longer right in the head. We’re counting on none of the other tributes having spent enough time with her to distinguish the difference between our real Louella and her body double.
Lou Lou’s gone from averting her eyes to watching us constantly, as if she’s trying to piece together a puzzle. She tugs on her ear a lot, which makes me wonder if it hurts, because that’s what Sid used to do when he had an earache. When she goes to the bathroom, Wiress says, “I think she has an audio implant. Probably a two-way transmitter.”
“Why?” asks Wyatt.
“So they can tell her what to say. Direct her behavior.”
“Hear what she hears,” says Mags.
She doesn’t have to explain the ramifications of that. Don’t tell Lou Lou any secrets. There’s a flip side to that, though. We can gain an advantage by telling her lies. During the Dark Days, the Capitol spied on us with jabberjays, mutts that looked like regular birds but could record the rebels’ conversations and play them back word for word. We figured this out and fed them false information. The Capitol released the jabberjays at the end of the war, thinking they’d die off, which they did, but not before they’d sired a whole new species by mating with female mockingbirds, creating Lenore Dove’s precious mockingjays. Now I guess Lou Lou is our own little jabberjay.
When we join the other Newcomers in the gym, Lou Lou draws some questioning looks, but they seem to buy that she’s our girl, only brain-damaged. None of them knew Louella or had more than a passing look at her, after all.
“You have to be careful what you say around her,” Maysilee warns them. “She’s not herself, and might repeat it to anyone.”
When we break up to practice, Wyatt agrees to take her. Which is helpful, as I don’t need a jabberjay at the moment.
Ampert catches my eye and we shake off the rest of the group. I don’t know how much Beetee has told him about the arena plot. But before I can broach that, he says, “My father says we need to get Nine to join our alliance.”
We spot the yellow-clad tributes nearby at the shelter-building booth. “Any specific reason why? I mean, Five and Eleven are still uncommitted, and they look a lot stronger.”
“He just said they were essential. I tried the first day, but they brushed me off. I wonder if they think I’m stuck-up.”
“You? Why would they think that?”
“Because I’m from Three. Because I know the tech stuff, maybe. Nine’s in the fields a lot. I don’t think they get much schooling out there, and everybody knows we do. People call us eggheads.”
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