Chapter 1: The Fourth Name
The harbor bell has a crack in it that nobody has fixed in your lifetime, so it doesn't ring so much as complain. It complained the morning the hovercraft took the last of the dock boys away to the war. It complained the morning the loudspeakers said the Capitol had fallen. It complained eight days after that, while a woman from the new government read the names of District Four's dead off a damp sheet of paper in the square, and you stood at the back with a netting needle still in your fist because you had forgotten to put it down.
Finnick Odair was the fourth name. You remember that, because you remember thinking it was a stupid place for him. He'd always been first at everything.
Six weeks later a second sheet came. Clerical error, it said. Recovering in a Capitol hospital, it said. The woman who read it smiled like she'd brought everyone a present. Around you the square went loud with crying and laughing and somebody's grandmother fainting into a basket of crabs. You walked back to the net sheds and mended a trawl net for nine hours straight, until your fingers bled into the twine and Old Pell took the needle out of your hand and sent you home.
That was spring. It's autumn now, and the sheds smell the way they always smell in autumn, of tar and wet hemp and the green rot of weed caught in the mesh. Light comes through the gaps in the planks in long gold bars. Pell is asleep on a coil of rope in the corner, which is his job, more or less. You have a seine net stretched on the frame in front of you with a hole in it the size of a dog, and you are working the edges with your needle and singing the song about the drowned sailor and his three wives, badly, because nobody's around to stop you.
"That's not how it goes," says somebody behind you.
You don't turn. You finish the knot you're on. Sheet bend, pull, cinch, next mesh. Your hands stay steady. Later you will be proud of that.
"It's exactly how it goes," you say. "You're thinking of the version they sing in the Capitol. They cut the third wife. She was the best one."
"She stabbed him."
"He had it coming."
A pause, and then a laugh, low and rusty, like a hinge that hasn't been opened in a while. That's what makes you turn around. Not the voice. The laugh.
He's in the doorway with the afternoon behind him. Thinner than the last time you saw him, which was on the big screen in the square during the Quarter Quell, and thinner in a different way than the Capitol ever made him. His hair is the same bronze, already stiff with salt, though someone has cut it short. Plain grey shirt. Canvas trousers rolled at the ankle. Barefoot, of course. On the left side of his neck there's a scar that runs from under his jaw down past his collar, a ridged pink rope of a thing, still new enough to look sore.
His eyes haven't changed at all. Sea-green and much too bright, the color the shallows go over white sand at noon. The Capitol used to sell posters of those eyes. You once saw a woman in the fish market with a pair of them printed on her skirt.
"Hello," says Finnick Odair.
"You're dead," you tell him.
"I got better."
"There was a list."
"So I'm told." He leans a shoulder on the doorframe, carefully, like he's still learning where his balance lives. "Fourth. I was the fourth name. I've never been so insulted in my life, and I've been interviewed by Caesar Flickerman."
You look at him for a long moment. Then you turn back to the net and pick up your needle, because the alternative is doing something unforgivable with your face. In all the years he's been coming into these sheds, Finnick Odair has never once seen you cry, and you aren't going to start for a man who can't even stay properly dead.
"What are you doing here?" you ask the net.
"I live here."
"You live in the Victors' Village. Up the hill. Where the windows have glass in them."
"I lived there." Footsteps on the planks, quiet because his feet are bare. He comes around the frame and stops on the other side of it, so the dog-sized hole in the seine hangs between you like a window. Through it you can see his hands. They're wrapped around a length of cord, worrying it the way they always do. You used to watch him do it on the screen during interviews, tying and untying while Caesar leaned in and asked about his love life. "I gave the house to Annie."
That does get your eyes up. "You gave Annie a house."
"She'd have got it anyway. It was in the divorce."
He says it lightly. He watches your face while he says it, which is not light at all.
"Panem doesn't have divorces."
"It does now. President Paylor is very keen on paperwork." He tugs a knot tight. "We got married in a bunker in the middle of a war because the people running the war thought it would look nice on television, and because I wanted her to have my name if I didn't come home. She's my best friend. She'll always be my best friend. But this summer she held my hand on the porch and said, Finnick, I think we got married so one of us would have something to come back to. And then we both came back." One shoulder lifts. "So now she has a porch and I have a room above the chandlery that smells like lamp oil."
"Fitch's place?"
"Fitch's place."
"The roof leaks."
"I've noticed."
You go back to the net. He keeps standing there. The tide is coming in under the floor; you can hear it sucking at the pilings. In the corner Pell snores, theatrically, like a man who is not asleep.
"Can I ask you something?" Finnick says.
"You're going to anyway."
He holds the cord up into a bar of light. It's a knot you recognize, a fat ornamental lump of crossings and tucks, the kind of thing you'd hang over a door for luck. Or half of one. The last few passes are a mess.
"In the hospital they gave me string," he says. "For my hands. The doctors had a theory about fine motor control and I had a theory about not screaming, and string helped with both. I tied everything I knew. Then I tried to tie this one, and I couldn't remember how it ends." He turns it over. "Mags taught it to me. I was sitting on her porch steps and she did it so fast I thought it was a trick. I made her do it nine times."
Mags taught it to you too. She taught it to half the women in these sheds, sitting on an upturned crate with her bad hand in her lap, tapping the crossings with one crooked finger. Mags walked into the poison fog in the Quell so Finnick wouldn't have to carry her, and the whole district watched her do it, and the sheds were silent for three days afterward.
You put down your needle and hold out your hand through the hole in the net.
He gives it to you. His fingers are warm and cracked across the knuckles and he doesn't let go of the cord right away, so for a second you're both holding it, through the window in the seine, like two people holding opposite ends of a rope in a tug of war that neither of you wants to start.
"You're doing it backward," you say.
"I am not."
"You go under on the last tuck. Not over. Everyone from the Capitol does it backward. They learn it from pictures." You pick the mess apart with your thumbnail and redo the last four passes, slowly, so he can watch. Under, round, through, draw. The knot closes into itself like a fist. You hand it back.
He turns it in the light. He doesn't say anything for a while.
"Everyone from the Capitol," he repeats eventually.
"You've been gone a long time."
"I was born on that dock." He points through the wall at it. "Right there. My mother didn't make it home in time."
"Then you should know better than to tie knots like a drunk gull."
There it is again, that rusty laugh. It's worse this time. It cracks in the middle.
"You said that to me before," he says. "Years ago. The first summer I was home after my Games. Everybody in this district looked at me like I was a statue they'd put up in the square. People brought me pies. Somebody named a baby after me. And I came in here with a gill net I'd torn on the breakwater, and you charged me double, and you told me I tied knots like a drunk gull."
"You did."
"I know I did." He sets the cord on the frame between you. "I thought about it every time I went to the Capitol. Every single time. There was one person at home who thought I was an idiot with a torn net. It was very restful."
You don't know what to do with that, so you pick up your needle again.
"I want to work here," he says.
You laugh. You can't help it. "No."
"I'm good with rope."
"You're a victor."
"There aren't any victors. There aren't any Games." He says it very evenly, and for a second the charm drops off him like a wet coat and you can see what's underneath, which is a tired man with a scar on his throat. "I'm just somebody who's good with rope and bad at sleeping, and I need something to do with my hands that isn't holding a trident. Please."
"Pell does the hiring."
"Hire him," says Pell from the corner, without opening his eyes.
"You're asleep."
"I'm resting my eyes. Hire him. You've been doing the work of three since the war and you won't let me take on the Darrow girl because she talks."
"She talks about her feet."
"Hire the victor. He doesn't talk about his feet."
"I'll never mention my feet," says Finnick solemnly.
You look at the two of them, the old man and the dead man, and you feel your mouth do something you do not give it permission to do.
"Dawn," you say. "Not after dawn. Dawn. You take the fourth bench, by the leak. You don't touch the bone needles, they were my grandmother's. If anybody comes in here wanting an autograph, you leave by the back. And if I catch you tying anything backward, I'll throw you in the harbor myself."
He smiles at you. Not the Capitol smile, the one off the posters, the slow devastating one that used to sell perfume. A smaller one, a little crooked, like he isn't used to wearing it.
"Dawn," he agrees, and goes.
You stand there for a while after he's gone, holding the net and not mending it. The tide comes in. The light moves along the floor. Somewhere out in the harbor the bell complains about something.
"Been sitting on the seawall out there every afternoon for a week," Pell says to the ceiling.
You turn around. "What?"
"Every afternoon. Same spot. Facing the door." He scratches his beard. "Working himself up to it, I'd say."
"To asking for a job."
Pell finally opens one eye, and looks at you with it, a long look, the way he looks at a net he's deciding whether to save.
"Wasn't the job he was nervous about," he says, and goes back to sleep.