Chapter 189: Stay Put
Jake had expected to arrive before the Games started.
He hadn't. The transit nausea recovery had cost him the opening sequence, and now he was working from behind rather than ahead. That was a manageable problem — the opening sequence of this arena was survivable for Katniss without intervention, and the Red Queen's network access gave him a real-time picture of the arena's internal state that compensated for some of the lost positioning.
What he hadn't fully appreciated until he was standing inside it was the scale of what the Capitol had built.
From the outside, the arena would have looked like a dome — a hemispherical enclosure, acres of it, the Capitol's engineers having constructed an entire self-contained environment inside a climate-controlled shell. From the inside it looked indistinguishable from a real forest, which was the point. The weather was manufactured. The hazards were scheduled. Every rainstorm and electrical surge and toxic cloud was a decision made by a technician pressing a sequence of buttons in a control room that the tributes were never supposed to know existed.
Jake knew it existed.
The Red Queen had been inside the control room's systems since minute three.
"Current status of the control room," Jake said quietly, moving through the trees with the formation behind him.
"Twenty-two technical operators on shift," the Red Queen said. "Full monitoring of all tribune tracker positions. The clockwork hazard system is running on the scheduled cycle — Sector 4 activates in eleven minutes, that's the electrical zone." A brief pause. "They haven't detected my presence. The display anomaly when I entered was brief enough to be attributed to a calibration fluctuation. They've moved on."
"Keep it that way."
"I've blocked their external monitoring feeds. Their observation of the arena's perimeter is currently showing them a looped recording of the last four minutes. They will not see what's happening at the boundary."
Jake looked ahead through the trees. The arena's edge was close — four kilometers, the Red Queen had said, and he'd been moving steadily since the formation recovered. The forest around him was authentic in every sensory detail: real trees, real soil, real insects, the sound and smell of a genuine outdoor environment. The Capitol had spared nothing on the interior.
He wondered briefly what the per-capita cost of this arena had been, divided across District 12's population.
He stopped wondering and kept moving.
The boundary revealed itself only when the Red Queen marked it on his wrist display.
To his eyes it was seamless — the trees continued, the sky continued, the ground continued. There was no visible edge, no transition, no indication that twenty centimeters ahead of him was the physical limit of the constructed world.
He raised the triangular shield.
The vibranium edge met the barrier surface and went through it with a sound like tearing metal — a sizzle of disrupted circuitry and displaced current, sparks running along the shield's edge before the material's energy absorption dampened them. He drew the shield down in a long arc.
The gash opened.
Behind the seamless forest image: cables, framework, the industrial infrastructure of a massive technological construct. The Capitol's arena was a machine that looked like nature, and the seam between them was exactly as abrupt as that implied.
He stepped back and nodded to the nearest Knight.
The robot planted its feet, crossed its arms against its chest, and drove forward.
The impact was significant. The breach opened into a clean hole, the structural panel failing outward in a section roughly the dimensions of the robot's shoulder width. Beyond it: open sky, the gray-white exterior of the dome, and two Capitol security personnel in full white armor staring at the thing that had just come through their installation's wall with expressions of complete disorientation.
They raised their weapons.
The robot absorbed the small-caliber fire with the indifference of something built to take considerably more than that, took one step toward them, and resolved the situation in the economical manner of a machine with specific instructions and no competing considerations.
Jake turned to his most experienced Knight. "Take fifty and clear the exterior perimeter. All security personnel. I need the area outside this dome neutralized before we start moving equipment."
The Knight nodded, climbed back into his cockpit, and the formation split with the practiced efficiency of people who had been training for exactly this kind of deployment. Fifty robots moved through the breach and spread outward along the dome's exterior surface.
The sounds that followed — gunfire, impact, brief and decisive — were finished within four minutes.
Jake turned back to the arena interior.
Katniss was still inside.
He checked her tracker position on the wrist display. She'd moved significantly since the launch — away from the Cornucopia, into the forest, and was now positioned in the inner zone with a cluster of other trackers that the Red Queen's pattern analysis identified as the alliance group Haymitch had brokered.
He started moving toward her position, the remaining fifty robots following through the trees.
He'd been thinking about the Capitol's technology since his first transit into this world.
Panem's weapons were conventional — physical projectiles, Capitol-standard rifles, nothing approaching the energy weapon sophistication that HYDRA had been building in 1943. In straight combat capability, the Capitol's military force was significantly below what Jake's robot formation represented. The gap wasn't close.
But the Capitol's non-combat technology was genuinely interesting. The hovercraft fleet — fast, quiet, capable of vertical operation in confined spaces, equipped with tractor beam retrieval systems that the Capitol used to collect tribute bodies from the arena. The medical technology that the Capitol deployed selectively, capable of regrowth and structural repair that went well beyond anything Jake had accessed in other dimensions. The tracker technology. The broadcast infrastructure.
Things worth having.
Panem as a political system was terminal — the Red Queen had assessed the district-level data and confirmed what the film's narrative made obvious: the structure was past its sustainable point, the pressures building faster than the Capitol's suppression mechanisms could manage. Revolution wasn't a question of whether. It was a question of when and what shape it took.
Jake had no strong attachment to managing that process for the districts. That was Katniss's story, and Coin's, and the people who had been living inside the system their whole lives and had earned the right to determine its conclusion.
What he wanted was to extract value before the collapse made extraction complicated.
The hovercraft especially.
Batman's aircraft was extraordinary in combat but had specific operational requirements. The Capitol's hovercraft were designed for sustained operation in varied conditions, faster in transit, and the tractor beam technology had applications that the Batcraft simply didn't.
He'd identified the staging area for the Capitol's arena support fleet during the Red Queen's initial network penetration: a landing platform two kilometers east of the dome's exterior, eight aircraft currently on the ground, crews on standby for the standard extraction operations that followed each tribute death.
Fifty Knights were currently between that platform and any Capitol response.
He'd deal with the extraction logistics after he'd dealt with Katniss.
Her tracker showed her stationary in the inner zone, clustered with four others.
The Red Queen fed him audio from the nearest arena camera as he approached through the trees — fragments of conversation, the particular quality of people who had been through something difficult and were using the recovery window to think rather than to rest.
He heard Finnick's voice. Beetee's. The quieter, more contained tones that he recognized as Katniss's.
He was forty meters out when the situation changed.
A tracker moving fast from the northeast — isolated, closing on the cluster from outside their field of view. The Red Queen flagged it three seconds before he'd have identified it himself.
Jake accelerated.
He came through the treeline at the cluster's northeast edge at the same moment the tribute from District 2 — Brutus, the career veteran, the one the Capitol had clearly been counting on as a primary threat — came through from the opposite direction with the speed and commitment of someone executing a planned attack on a position he'd been stalking for twenty minutes.
The attack landed on one of the group — Jake was a half-second too late to prevent the initial contact, arriving as the body was still falling.
Brutus saw him coming and pivoted with the fast, adaptive response of a man who had survived multiple Games through exactly that kind of pivot.
Jake's shield arrived first.
The triangular vibranium edge connected with Brutus's center mass at the end of a full-extension throw — not a killing blow, directed impact, controlled force — and sent him backward through the air in a five-meter arc before he met the ground and rolled twice and stopped.
He was alive. Winded. His offensive capacity temporarily suspended.
Jake caught the returning shield and turned to face the group.
They had weapons up. Every one of them, in the fraction of a second between the attack and the throw and the return, had drawn or nocked or raised something. The instincts that kept victors alive were fast and they were pointed at him.
Except Katniss.
Katniss had her bow up but the arrow wasn't drawn. She was looking at him with the expression of someone processing several things simultaneously, the recognition moving across her face in stages — the coat, the bearing, the absence of a tribute uniform — and landing somewhere that wasn't quite belief but wasn't disbelief either.
Haymitch lowered his weapon first. He'd never met Jake directly, but he'd been briefed, and Haymitch's operational judgment was fast enough to work with partial information.
Finnick held his trident level and waited.
Jake looked at the group. At the fallen tribute behind him. At the one who'd been hit by Brutus's attack, the medically trained member of the alliance who was the linchpin of the plan that Beetee and the District 3 victors had been developing — the plan that Jake knew from the film's structure was essential to everything that came next.
"District 13 sent you," Johanna said. It wasn't quite a question.
"Nobody sent me," Jake said. "But if you're working with District 13 — if you have a way out of this arena that doesn't involve the Capitol deciding who leaves — then stay exactly where you are and don't make any decisions for the next ten minutes."
Finnick looked at him steadily. "Why ten minutes?"
"Because in ten minutes the exterior of this dome will be fully secured and the Capitol's hovercraft fleet will be under different management." Jake looked at Beetee. "And because I need to know if the plan you've been building around the lightning tree is still viable, or whether what just happened changes the calculation."
The silence that followed had the quality of a group of very capable people rapidly updating their operational picture.
Beetee blinked. "How do you know about the lightning tree?"
"I know a lot of things," Jake said. "The useful question is whether you want to spend the next ten minutes explaining how I know them, or spend them making sure the plan still works."
Katniss lowered her bow.
She was looking at him with an expression he didn't have a clean word for. Not surprise — there was something past surprise in it, something that had been held in suspension for a year and was now moving again.
"You came back," she said.
"I came back," Jake said.
Behind him, through the trees, the sound of fifty robots moving into position around the arena's perimeter was barely audible — a low mechanical hum, purposeful and steady, the sound of a plan executing.
"Stay close," Jake said to the group. "All of you. The hazard cycle is going to activate in this sector in about seven minutes, and I'd rather not lose anyone to the Capitol's schedule when we have other things to do."
He turned to check Brutus's position — still down, still not a threat — and then back to Beetee.
"Tell me about the wire," he said.
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