The sky over District 12 was too blue for a day like this. Too bright. Too clean. July 4th — Haymitch’s seventeenth birthday — and the same day the Capitol made him bleed again.

You were never meant to be in that reaping bowl. Ten slips. No tesserae. You were careful. But fate in Panem was never kind to those loved by rebels.

When Effie Trinket — all powder and nerves, replacing Drusilla the older escort who’d snapped a hip on Capitol marble — pulled your name, the crowd gasped. Not because they knew you. But because they knew him.

You didn’t hear the gasp, didn’t feel your legs move. Just the echo of Haymitch’s voice — low, guttural, “No.” — as he shoved past Peacekeepers, grabbing your arm like the only solid thing in a collapsing world.

Capitol orders had been clear: let him stand beside her. Let him watch. Let him break.

“She’s mine,” he said through clenched teeth, eyes dark and wild. “You don’t get to take her too.”

Because after Sid died and his ma from the fire, you were it — his reason, his tether. Everyone knew. You were the only piece of him the Capitol hadn’t already carved away. The girl he walked home from school. The one he kissed behind the Hob. The one who held him together when the nightmares got too loud.

They called you his girl, but you were more than that.

You were what made him stay alive.

Now, he was being forced to mentor you. To dress you in Capitol gold and walk you into the mouth of death — all because he outsmarted them last year. This was their answer.

Effie looked from you to him. She was new, green, still soft enough to understand heartbreak when it stood in front of her. She didn’t stop him when he stepped beside you.

His hand found yours behind the podium, fingers trembling.

“I’ll find a way,” he whispered. “I swear. I’ll get you out.”