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Summary: Chapters 15 & 16

Chapter 15

Haymitch and his fellow tributes wake up on the morning of the Hunger Games. Haymitch knows Maysilee and Wyatt are upset with him for abandoning the Newcomers, so Haymitch offers Maysilee the packet of battery-making tools from Beetee as a peace offering.

Wiress and Mags say a heartfelt goodbye to the four tributes, and Drusilla loads them into a van. They are then injected with a tracker and directed into a hovercraft opposite the tributes from District 11. Lou Lou notices the woven grass flowers around one of the girls’ necks, and starts to sing an Eleven harvest song. The Eleven tributes are confused that a girl from Twelve knows an Eleven song, but they prompt her to keep singing. Haymitch, Maysilee, and Wyatt explain to them who Lou Lou really is.

The hovercraft lands and the tributes are each brought to individual doors. Haymitch, Maysilee, Wyatt, and Lou Lou share a group hug and then go through their designated door. Haymitch dresses himself in Twelve’s black arena uniform. A shaky Effie arrives to check on him and places his token outside of his shirt, per Snow’s request. He asks her to get the token back to Lenore Dove when he dies, and Effie agrees. She then directs him to the tube that will bring him into the arena. 

The tube rises and Haymitch emerges in a meadow surrounded by woods and a snow-capped mountain. The arena is beautiful, but Haymitch doesn’t trust it because it looks “too attractive to be good.” The gong rings and Haymitch decides to run north, grabbing a backpack, a knife, and a spear on the way. He takes off running through the meadow, even though he hears eighteen cannon fires (the indicator that a tribute has died).

He stops for a moment to check his pack, after he has made it a decent distance from the bloodbath at the Cornucopia, and realizes he has two gallons of water, a hammock, binoculars, a dozen apples, a dozen eggs, and six potatoes. He is happy for a moment about the potatoes, but he soon remembers he gave the battery-making tools to Maysilee. He also finds coin-sized tablets of what he thinks is charcoal in a smaller pocket.

He enters the forest and comes across his first berm of flowers, but decides to keep heading north instead of checking it for a mutt portal. He passes so much fruit while he walks that he wonders if his pack of supplies is a joke. He briefly considers dumping it but ultimately decides not to. He comes across a stream and drinks a few handfuls. Soon a rabbit appears, and approaches the stream to do the same, but it immediately squeals and dies. 

Chapter 16

Haymitch realizes the stream is poisoned. He wishes he had an antidote, and recalls that his Mawmaw used to say that charcoal tablets were “good for whatever ails your belly,” and they do the trick. He remembers Mags’s advice about looking for clues in the arena and guesses that everything in the arena is poisonous, and that is why there is food in the packs. Haymitch hears two additional cannon fires and assumes two other tributes were poisoned. He tries to continue north but still feels ill and decides to hide in a blueberry bush while he waits out the sickness.

The anthem plays and Haymitch peaks his head out to see the images of today’s fallen tributes projected onto the sky. He counts four Careers and sixteen Newcomers dead ,and he is devastated to see that Wyatt is one of them. He briefly hopes Ampert managed to get the sunflowers off of the Nines before the hovercraft lifted their bodies out of the arena, then falls asleep. 

Haymitch wakes to find a rabbit staring at him, gives it a piece of an apple, and is relieved when the rabbit doesn’t die to discover that the apple isn’t poisonous.

Suddenly, he hears a voice whispering, “Find Haymitch,” and discovers that Lou Lou has found him. Haymitch asks who told her to look for him, and she points to her ear and says, “Murderers.” Disconcerted, Haymitch asks where everyone else is, and he learns that the Newcomers and the Careers are all on the mountain. The two walk on as Haymitch looks for a rock to use with the striker. He carefully extracts several from the stream and locates a good one via trial and error.

Later, Lou Lou falls asleep, and Haymitch examines the berms. He discovers they are labeled and soon comes across a berm of gas plants and recalls Lenore Dove showing him that they ignite when held near a flame. Lou Lou wakes, and the two walk on until Lou Lou breaks away and excitedly breathes in a berm of bee balm—Haymitch guesses the flowers remind her of home. However, she soon starts to bleed and convulse, and Haymitch realizes too late that they are poison, too. He can do nothing to save her as he watches her suffer. Finally, he yells, “Enough!...She is not your plaything!” and yanks out her pump.

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