Enobaria smiles at Johanna. 'Don't look so smug,' says Johanna. 'We'll kill you anyway.

Slowly, with many lost days, I come back to life.

hey. I just wanted to make sure you got home," I say. "Katniss, I live three houses away from you," he says.

I know what blood poisoning is, Katniss," says Peeta. "Even if my mother isn't a healer." I'm jolted back in time, to another wound, another set of bandages. "You said that same thing to me in the first Hunger Games. Real or not real?" "Real," he says. "And you risked your life getting the medicine that saved me?" "Real." I shrug. "You were the reason I was alive to do it.

She’s really gone, then. The little girl with the back of her shirt sticking out like a duck tail, the one who needed help reaching the dishes, and who begged to see the frosted cakes in the bakery window. Time and tragedy have forced her to grow too quickly, at least for my taste, into a young woman who stitches bleeding wounds and knows our mother can hear only so much.

There's no going back. So we might as well get on with things.

It's the first gift that's always the hardest to pay back.