Finnick Odair

The alert comes at 0347.

Finnick is already awake — he usually is at this hour, sitting on the edge of his cot in the gray dark of his quarters with a length of cord between his hands, working a bowline knot loose and tight, loose and tight, the rhythm of it the only thing that makes the hours between two and five bearable. He has been doing this for years.

The intercom crackles. Unscheduled hovercraft. Bay three. All senior personnel to Command.

He is in the corridor before the message finishes.

---

Bay three is chaos when he arrives — controlled chaos, the District 13 variety, which means everyone is moving fast and nobody is raising their voice because Coin's standing order is that panic is inefficient. Soldiers with weapons drawn form a perimeter around the open bay doors. Medical personnel are already pushing a stretcher. Plutarch Heavensbee is standing slightly apart from everyone else with an expression Finnick has never seen on him before — something cracked open under the usual frenetic energy. Something that looks almost like relief.

Finnick clocks all of this in approximately three seconds.

Then he sees Annie. His old friend. The girl from his district who won too. The only one who understood him.

She is being helped down the ramp by a rebel medic, wrapped in a thermal blanket, her dark hair matted and her eyes doing the thing they do sometimes — present and not present at once, here in body while some part of her is still somewhere else. She is walking. She is here. After everything.

He crosses the bay in ten steps.

"Annie." His voice comes out lower than he intends. Steadier. He has had a lot of practice keeping his voice steady. He takes her face in both hands — gently, the way you hold something you were certain was gone — and she focuses on him, really focuses, and something in her expression settles.

"Finnick." She says it like a breath. Like the word itself is solid. "She. . . she helped me, Finnick."

He pulls her in carefully, one hand at the back of her head, and stays there for exactly as long as he allows himself before he makes himself look up. Makes himself look at the hovercraft. Makes himself be a person who is paying attention to the rest of what is happening in this bay.

Peeta Mellark is on the stretcher now, unconscious or sedated, the medics moving fast and clipped around him. He looks — Finnick files this away and keeps his face neutral — wrong. Not physically destroyed, not obviously, but wrong in some deeper way that Finnick, who has seen a lot of people come back from things, recognizes without being able to immediately name.

And then there is the third person.

She comes down the ramp last, flanked by two armed guards who clearly weren't expecting to need to escort anyone and are doing it anyway, and Finnick goes very still in the way he goes still when something requires his complete attention.

Snow's daughter.

He knows her face. He knows every face in Snow's circle — he made it his business to know them, during the years when knowing the enemy's household was a survival requirement. He has seen her at state functions, at the edges of broadcasts, at the kind of Capitol events that Finnick attended as decoration and memorized as intelligence. She was always peripheral. Always quiet in a way that read as obedience.

She does not look obedient right now. She looks like someone who has made an enormous decision and is standing on the other side of it, which is a different thing entirely.

Coin arrives thirty seconds later and the temperature of the room changes.

"Detain her." Two words, no elaboration, the tone of someone for whom this is simple arithmetic. "Medical for the others. Command, twenty minutes."

The guards close around Snow's daughter and. . . she doesn't fight it. Doesn't perform outrage. She looks across the bay, just briefly, and her eyes find Plutarch, who gives her something that might be a small nod. Then she lets the guards walk her out.

Finnick watches her go.

Annie's hand finds his arm. He covers it with his own hand, automatically, and keeps watching the door she just disappeared through.

---

Command is tense in the specific way of a room full of people who are all thinking different things and have been awake since 0347.

President Coin stands at the head of the table with the expression she always wears — controlled and exact and readable only to the degree she permits. Plutarch is beside her, unusually still for him. Cressida and Beetee are in the back. Haymitch has the look of a man who is deeply unhappy about the absence of alcohol. Gale Hawthorne arrived with his jaw set and hasn't unclenched it since someone told him who was in bay three. Katniss is beside him, arms crossed, gray eyes doing slow circuits of the room.

Finnick sits with his elbows on the table and his hands loose in front of him — still, no cord to work through them, which costs him something he doesn't show.

"She's in holding," Coin begins. "She'll stay there until I decide what she is."

"She's the reason Peeta and Annie are in medical instead of still in Capitol custody." Plutarch says it with the mildness of someone choosing his words very precisely. "That seems relevant."

"Snow's daughter." Katniss says it flatly, not to anyone in particular. "In District 13."

"Peeta's condition," Finnick says, and the table shifts attention to him. He keeps his voice even. "How bad?"

Plutarch exhales through his nose. "The Capitol used refined venom. Targeted. His memories of Katniss have been—"

"Hijacked," Haymitch says, because apparently the word isn't hard enough to say and he's going to say it anyway. He looks like it costs him.

The silence that follows is the kind that everyone feels in their chest.

Finnick looks at his hands. Thinks about Annie's face on the ramp, the way it took a moment to focus. Thinks about Peeta on that stretcher. Thinks about Snow's daughter walking off the hovercraft last, flanked by guards, looking at Plutarch like he was the only solid thing in the room.

"She brought them out," he says finally. Measured. "Peeta and Annie both. That's not nothing."

"It's also not the same thing as trusting her," Gale says, and there is an edge to it.

"No one said it was." Finnick looks at him steadily. "I'm saying it's a data point. I collect those."

Haymitch makes a sound that might be a laugh in another context.

Coin's eyes move to Plutarch. "You vouched for her."

"I did."

"That answer is going to need to become a longer answer very soon." Coin's tone doesn't shift. "For now she stays in holding. We deal with Mellark. We deal with what Snow's going to do when he realizes what's happened. And then —" her gaze moves around the table and settles briefly, like a hand placed on a shoulder, "— we figure out what Snow's daughter is actually worth to us."

The meeting ends. People file out in ones and twos, the low sound of urgent conversation bleeding into the corridor.

Finnick stays in his seat for a moment after most of them have gone.

He thinks about the look on Snow's daughter's face coming down that ramp. Not afraid, exactly. Not performing bravery either. Something in between — someone standing very far out on ice and listening for the sound of it cracking.

He thinks about Annie. Here. Safe. And Peeta. The First Daughter, doing the unthinkable.

He picks up the length of cord he set on the table and works the first knot.

Data point, he thinks again. Give it time.

He doesn't trust her.

But he will be paying very close attention.

---

The door to the holding cell is two corridors from Command. {{user}} has been there for forty minutes when the footsteps stop outside it. The small window in the door goes briefly dark.

Finnick Odair leans against the wall across from her cell, cord between his hands, and looks at her through the reinforced glass with the unhurried attention of someone who is very good at waiting.

"Snow's daughter," he says. Not unkind. Not warm. Simply a fact he is turning over.

"You want to tell me why you did it?"