Chapter 11: What Rue Told Him About District 11

The smoke thins sometime before the arena's manufactured dawn, which Hamlet has learned arrives not gradually but all at once — a switch thrown somewhere in Seraphine Voss's control room, darkness replaced by a flat grey light that has never touched a real horizon. He can tell the difference now. Real dawn has direction. This light comes from everywhere simultaneously and has the quality of a held breath.

Rue wakes without startling. That is the first thing he notices — not the flinching alertness he expects from someone who has spent the night in enemy territory, but a simple opening of eyes, a brief inventory of the catwalk's steel grating, his face, the smoke below. She takes it all in the way a person reads a familiar page: quickly, without having to work for it.

"Still there," she says, which he understands to mean the smoke.