Chapter 23: Seraphine Voss Rewrites the Ending

The arena's dawn arrives between one breath and the next.

No gradual brightening, no slow warming of the stone — just the held-breath dark, and then light, complete and indifferent, flooding the amphitheater tiers with the Capitol's approximation of morning. Hamlet registers it through closed eyelids first: a reddening, then a whitening, then the full manufactured day pressing against his face like a hand. He opens his eyes to find the catwalk unchanged, Rue still asleep, her breathing slower and more regular than it has been in three days, the fever's grip loosening at last into something that resembles ordinary rest.

Mira is already awake. She has been awake, he suspects, for the better part of an hour — she inhabits wakefulness the way she inhabits everything, completely and without announcement.