aren't they the very reason I have to try to fight? Because what has been done to them is so wrong, so beyond justification, so evil that there is no choice? Because no one has the right to treat them as they have been treated?

So what I'd really like is to try and conceal him somewhere safe, then go hunt, and come back and collect him. But I have a feeling his ego isn't going to go for that suggestion.

The anguish I always feel when she's in pain wells up in my chest and threatens to register on my face.

I search his eyes for the slightest sign of anything, fear, remorse, anger. But there's only the same look of amusement that ended our last conversation. It's as if he's speaking the words again. "Oh, my dear Miss Everdeen. I thought we had agreed not to lie to each other." He's right. We did. The point of my arrow shifts upward. I release the string. And President Coin collapses over the side of the balcony and plunges to the ground. Dead.

But I don't know what to him about the aftermath of killing a person. About how they never leave you.

If you'd been taken by the Capital and hijacked and then tried to kill Peeta, is this the way he would be treating you?

As coal pressured into pearls by our weighty existence. Beauty that arose out of pain.