What was that you were saying just before the food arrived? Something about me... no competition... best thing that ever happened to you.

Don't you see, Katniss, this will decide things. One way or the other. By the end of the day, they'll ether be dead or with us. It's...it's more than we could hope for! Well, that's a sunny view of our situation.

I keep hoping that as time passes by, we’ll regain the ease between us, but part of me knows it’s futile. There’s no going back.

Let the Seventy-forth Hunger Games begin, Cato, I think. Let them begin for real.

if he goes and dies on me now, I know I'll go completely insane.

And then it happens. Up and down the row, the victors begin to join hands. Some right away, like the morphlings, or Wiress and Beetee. Others unsure but caught up in the demands of those around them, like Brutus and Enobaria. By the time the anthem plays its final strains, all twenty-four of us stand in one unbroken line in what must be the first public show of unity among the districts since the Dark Days. You can see the realization of this as the screens begin to pop into blackness. It's too late, though. In the confusion they didn't cut us off in time. Everyone has seen.

The woods always look different at night...as if the daytime trees and flowers and stones had gone to bed and sent slightly more ominous versions of themselves to take their places.