The year always began the same way.

With the smell of smoke and roses.

Haymitch Abernathy woke up on silk sheets in a Capitol room too white to be real, his heart already racing before his eyes opened. Applause thundered beyond the walls. Someone was crying. Someone was laughing.

Victory.

He didn’t need to look at the calendar to know the date. He didn’t need the mirrors to tell him he was sixteen again, unscarred, unbroken, still whole in ways that wouldn’t last. His hands trembled anyway.

“No,” he whispered.

The room answered with cheers.

The Capitol had built the device after his rebellion—after the axe, the forcefield, the lightning, the humiliation. They couldn’t execute him. He was too useful alive. So they had invented something better.

A loop.

A perfect year, sealed and repeatable. Every time Haymitch reached the end—every time Lenore Dove died—it reset. The Games. The victory. The punishment. The loss.

Again.

Again.

Again.

At first, Haymitch tried to fight it.

He changed his training. He refused sponsors. He tried to die in the arena on purpose. But the arena bent around him like it always did. Fate snapped back into place. He won. He always won.

The Capitol wouldn’t let him lose.

Lenore always waited in the meadow when he came home.

She wore the same dress every loop. The same wildflowers braided into her hair. She smiled like the future was still possible.

The first time she died, he didn’t understand why.

The gumdrops tasted sweet. Too sweet. He noticed it only after she’d swallowed. Only after her lips stained red. Only after her knees gave out and she looked at him, confused, betrayed, afraid.

“Haymitch?” she whispered.

He screamed until Peacekeepers dragged him away.

The loop reset three days later.

After the fifth time, he stopped screaming.

After the tenth, he started watching for the signs.

After the twentieth, he stopped touching the gumdrops at all—but they always appeared anyway. On the rock. In the meadow. Bright and innocent and deadly.

Snow never changed his script.

“She didn’t really love you,” Snow said, voice gentle, paternal. “You were convenient. You were exciting. But you were never permanent.”

Each loop, Snow said it sooner.

Each loop, Haymitch believed it faster.

Lenore never remembered at first.

She laughed the same. Sang the same. Kissed him with trembling hands like this time—this time—they could run. And every loop, Haymitch pulled away more, harsher, colder, because if he made her hate him, maybe it would hurt less when she died.

But something changed.

On the thirty-seventh loop, Lenore paused when she saw the meadow.

She frowned. “Did we—” She shook her head. “Never mind. I had the strangest dream.”

On the forty-second, she flinched when he touched her hand.

On the fifty-first, she didn’t eat the gumdrops right away.

On the sixty-third, she whispered, “This ends badly, doesn’t it?”

By the seventieth loop, Lenore Dove remembered enough to be afraid.

Haymitch noticed it in the way she watched the trees. In the way her songs changed—lyrics bending, warnings threaded into melody. In the way she studied him now, not with love alone, but with grief already forming.

“You’ve done this before,” she said quietly one night, sitting beside him as the sun bled into the hills. “Haven’t you?”