"Take her out," says my mother. Soonkyu and Taeyeon literally carry me from the room while I shout obscenities at her. They pin me down on a bed in one of the extra bedrooms until I stop fighting.

While I lie there, sobbing, tears trying to squeeze out of the slit of my eye, I hear Taeyeon whisper to Soonkyu about President Park, about the uprising in District 8. "She wants us all to run," he says, but if Soonkyu has an opinion on this, he doesn't offer it.

After a while, my mother comes in and treats my face. Then she holds my hand, my arm, while Soonkyu fills her in on what happened with Yuri.

"So it's starting again?" she says. "Like before?"

"By the looks of it," he answers. "Who'd have thought we'd ever be sorry to see old Nichkhun go?"

Nichkhun would have been disliked, anyway, because of the uniform he wore, but it was his habit of luring starving young women into his bed for money that made him an object of loathing in the district. In really bad times, the hungriest would gather at his door at nightfall, vying for the chance to earn a few coins to feed their families by selling their bodies. Had I been older when my father died, I might have been among them. Instead I learned to hunt.

I don't know exactly what my mother means by things starting again, but I'm too angry and hurting to ask. It's registered, though, the idea of worse times returning, because when the doorbell rings, I shoot straight out of bed. Who could it be at this hour of the night? There's only one answer. Peacekeepers.

"They can't have him," I say.

"Might be you they're after," Soonkyu reminds me. "Or you," I say.

"Not my house," Soonkyu points out. "But I'll get the door."

"No, I'll get it," says my mother quietly.

We all go, though, following her down the hallway to the insistent ring of the bell. When she opens it, there's not a squad of Peacekeepers but a single, snow-caked figure. Bora. She holds out a small, damp cardboard box to me.

"Use these for your friend," she says. I take off the lid of the box, revealing half a dozen vials of clear liquid. "They're my mother's. She said I could take them. Use them, please." She runs back into the storm before we can stop her.

"Crazy girl," Soonkyu mutters as we follow, my mother into the kitchen.

Whatever my mother had given Yuri, I was right, it isn't enough. His teeth are gritted and his flesh shines with sweat. My mother fills a syringe with the clear liquid from one of the vials and shoots it into his arm. Almost immediately, his face begins to relax.

"What is that stuff?" asks Taeyeon.

"It's from the Capitol. It's called morphling," my mother answers.

"I didn't even know Bora knew Yuri," says Taeyeon.

"We used to sell her strawberries," I say almost angrily. What am I angry about, though? Not that she has brought the medicine, surely.

"She must have quite a taste for them," says Soonkyu.

That's what nettles me. It's the implication that there's something going on between Yuri and Bora. And I don't like it.

"She's my friend" is all I say.

Now that Yuri has drifted away on the painkiller, everyone seems to deflate. Seohyun makes us each eat some stew and bread. A room is offered to Yubin, but she has to go home to the other kids. Soonkyu and Taeyeon are both willing to stay, but my mother sends them home to bed as well. She knows it's pointless to try this with me and leaves me to tendYuri while she and Seohyun rest.

Alone in the kitchen with Yuri, I sit on Yubin's stool, holding his hand. After a while, my fingers find his face. I touch parts of him I have never had cause to touch before. His heavy, dark eyebrows, the curve of his cheek, the line of his nose, the hollow at the base of his neck. I trace the outline of stubble on his jaw and finally work my way to his lips. Soft and full, slightly chapped. His breath warms my chilled skin.

Does everyone look younger asleep? Because right now he could be the boy I ran into in the woods years ago, the one who accused me of stealing from his traps. What a pair we were - fatherless, frightened, but fiercely committed, too, to keeping our families alive. Desperate, yet no longer alone after that day, because we'd found each other. I think of a hundred moments in the woods, lazy afternoons fishing, the day I taught him to swim, that time I twisted my knee and he carried me home. Mutually counting on each other, watching each other's backs, forcing each other to be brave.

For the first time, I reverse our positions in my head. I imagine watching Yuri volunteering to save Onew in the reaping, having him torn from my life, becoming some strange girl's lover to stay alive, and then coming home with her. Living next to her. Promising to marry her.

The hatred I feel for him, for the phantom girl, for everything, is so real and immediate that it chokes me. Yuri is mine. I am his. Anything else is unthinkable. Why did it take him being whipped within an inch of his life to see it?

Because I'm selfish. I'm a coward. I'm the kind of girl who, when she might actually be of use, would run to stay alive and leave those who couldn't follow to suffer and die. This is the girl Yuri met in the woods today.

No wonder I won the Games. No decent person ever does.

You saved Taeyeon, I think weakly.

But now I question even that. I knew good and well that my life back in District 12 would be unlivable if I let that boy die.

I rest my head forward on the edge of the table, overcome with loathing for myself. Wishing I had died in the arena. Wishing Choi Siwon had blown me to bits the way President Park said he should have when I held out the berries.

The berries. I realize the answer to who I am lies in that handful of poisonous fruit. If I held them out to save Taeyeon because I knew I would be shunned if I came back without him, then I am despicable. If I held them out because I loved him, I am still self-centered, although forgivable. But if I held them out to defy the Capitol, I am someone of worth. The trouble is, I don't know exactly what was going on inside me at that moment.

Could it be the people in the districts are right? That it was an act of rebellion, even if it was an unconscious one? Because, deep down, I must know it isn't enough to keep myself, or my family, or my friends alive by running away. Even if I could. It wouldn't fix anything. It wouldn't stop people from being hurt the way Yuri was today.

Life in District 12 isn't really so different from life in the arena. At some point, you have to stop running and turn around and face whoever wants you dead. The hard thing is finding the courage to do it. Well, it's not hard for Yuri. He was born a rebel. I'm the one making an escape plan.

"I'm so sorry," I whisper. I lean forward and kiss him.

His eyelashes flutter and he looks at me through a haze of opiates. "Hey, Tippany."

"Hey, Yuri," I say.

"Thought you'd be gone by now," he says.

My choices are simple. I can die like quarry in the woods or I can die here beside Yuri. "I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to stay right here and cause all kinds of trouble."

"Me, too," Yuri says. He just manages a smile before the drugs pull him back under.

Someone gives my shoulder a shake and I sit up. I've fallen asleep with my face on the table. The white cloth has left creases on my good cheek. The other, the one that took the lash from Minho, throbs painfully. Yuri's dead to the world, but his fingers are locked around mine. I smell fresh bread and turn my stiff neck to find Taeyeon looking down at me with such a sad expression. I get the sense that he's been watching us awhile.

"Go on up to bed, Tiffany I'll look after him now," he says.

"Taeyeon. About what I said yesterday, about running - " I begin.

"I know," he says. "There's nothing to explain."

I see the loaves of bread on the counter in the pale, snowy morning light. The blue shadows under his eyes. I wonder if he slept at all. Couldn't have been long. I think of his agreeing to go with me yesterday, his stepping up beside me to protect Yuri, his willingness to throw his lot in with mine entirely when I give him so little in return. No matter what I do, I'm hurting someone. "Taeyeon - "

"Just go to bed, okay?" he says.

I feel my way up the stairs, crawl under the covers, and fall asleep at once. At some point, Krystal, the girl from District 2, enters my dreams. She chases me, pins me to the ground, and pulls out a knife to cut my face. It digs deeply into my cheek, opening a wide gash. Then Krystal begins to transform, her face elongating into a snout, dark fur sprouting from her skin, her fingernails growing into long claws, but her eyes remain unchanged. She becomes the mutta-tion form of herself, the wolflike creation of the Capitol that terrorized us the last night in the arena. Tossing back her head, she lets out a long, eerie howl that is picked up by other mutts nearby. Krystal begins to lap the blood flowing from my wound, each sending a new wave of pain through my face. I give a strangled cry and wake with a start, sweating and shivering at once. Cradling my damaged cheek in my hand, I remind myself that it was not Krystal but Minho who gave me this wound. I wish that Taeyeon were here to hold me, until I remember I'm not supposed to wish, that anymore. I have chosen Yuri and the rebellion, and a future with Taeyeon is the Capitol's design, not mine.

The swelling around my eye has gone down and I can open it a bit. I push aside the curtains and see the snowstorm has strengthened to a full-out blizzard. There's nothing but whiteness and the howling wind that sounds remarkably like the muttations.

I welcome the blizzard, with its ferocious winds and deep, drifting snow. This may be enough to keep the real wolves, also known as the Peacekeepers, from my door. A few days to think. To work out a plan. With Yuri  and Taeyeon and Soonkyu all at hand. This blizzard is a gift.

Before I go down to face this new life, though, I take some time making myself acknowledge what it will mean. Less than a day ago, I was prepared to head into the wilderness with my loved ones in midwinter, with the very real possibility of the Capitol pursuing us. A precarious venture at best. But now I am committing to something even more risky. Fighting the Capitol assures their swift retaliation. I must accept that at any moment I can be arrested. There will be a knock on the door, like the one last night, a band of Peacekeepers to haul me away. There might be torture. Mutilation. A bullet through my skull in the town square, if I'm fortunate enough to go that quickly. The Capitol has no end of creative ways to kill people. I imagine these things and I'm terrified, but let's face it: They've been lurking in the back of my brain, anyway. I've been a tribute in the Games. Been threatened by the president. Taken a lash across my face. I'm already a target.

Now comes the harder part. I have to face the fact that my family and friends might share this fate. Seohyun. I need only to think of Seohyun and all my resolve disintegrates. It's my job to protect her. I pull the blanket up over my head, and my breathing is so rapid I use up all the oxygen and begin to choke for air. I can't let the Capitol hurt Seohyun.

And then it hits me. They already have. They have killed her father in those wretched mines. They have sat by as she almost starved to death. They have chosen her as a tribute, then made her watch her sister fight to the death in the Games. She has been hurt far worse than I had at the age of twelve. And even that pales in comparison with Joy's life.

I shove off the blanket and in the cold air that seeps through the windowpanes.

Seohyun ... Joy ... aren't they the very reason I have to try to fight? Because what has been done