The Hunger Games

alive. Shaking his head to keep me from running to the Cornucopia. Fighting Cato to let me escape. Even hooking up with the Careers must have been a move to protect me. Peeta, it turns out, has never been a danger to me.

The thought makes me smile. I drop my hands and hold my face up to the moonlight so the cameras can be sure to catch it.

So, who is there left to be afraid of? Foxface? The boy tribute from her district is dead. She’s operating alone, at night.

And her strategy has been to evade, not attack. I don’t really think that, even if she heard my voice, she’d do anything but hope someone else would kill me.

Then there’s Thresh. All right, he’s a distinct threat. But I haven’t seen him, not once, since the Games began. I think about how Foxface grew alarmed when she heard a sound at the site of the explosion. But she didn’t turn to the Woods, she turned to whatever lies across from it. To that area of the arena that drops off into I don’t know what. I feel almost certain that the person she ran from was Thresh and that is his domain. He’d never have heard me from there and, even if he did, I’m up too high for someone his size to reach.

So that leaves Cato and the girl from District 2, who are now surely celebrating the new rule. They’re the only ones left who benefit from it besides Peeta and myself. Do I run from them now, on the chance they heard me call Peeta’s name? No, I think. Let them come. Let them come with their night-vision glasses and their heavy, branch-breaking bodies.

Right into the range of my arrows. But I know they won’t. If they didn’t come in daylight to my fire, they won’t risk what 244