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Summary
Chapter 16
Bobbin’s knife glances off Coriolanus’s body armor but slices s his arm. Bobbin doesn’t give up and attacks him again as three more tributes surround them. Coriolanus beats Bobbin to death with a two-by-four. He and Sejanus try to run, but the tributes Coral, Mizzen, and Tanner are close behind. In a desperate sprint, Coriolanus and Sejanus make it to the barricade and are painfully dragged through. Tanner cuts a deep gash into Sejanus’s calf before Sejanus is pulled to safety by the waiting Peacekeepers. Sejanus apologizes to Coriolanus, but Coriolanus is furious and absolutely uninterested in anything he has to say. They go straight to the citadel by car and Dr. Gaul patches them up discreetly in her lab’s clinic. At home, Coriolanus briefly interacts with a worried Tigris before collapsing into a deep sleep. The next day, he heads to the Academy, where the mentors all learn of a new prize for the winning mentor of the Hunger Games: The Plinths are sponsoring a full ride to the University. Onscreen, Coral, Mizzen, and Tanner kill Sol, the tribute from District 5. Shortly afterward Lucy Gray appears on camera, scrambling out of a tunnel and running from Jessup. Coriolanus doesn’t understand what’s happening, until he sees that Jessup is foaming at the mouth. He has rabies.
Chapter 17
In the Capitol, during the war, rabies re-emerged due to limited medical resources. Coriolanus recalls posters about rabies from the wartime streets and suspects Jessup was infected from a rodent bite in the monkey cage. Jessup, who has become enraged and demented due to the rabies, chases a horrified Lucy. When Coriolanus tries to send her water, the liquid maddens Jessup, and Coriolanus remembers that rabies causes hydrophobia, an intense aversion to water. Lysistrata, Jessup's mentor, immediately orders multiple water bottles to be delivered to him in order to help Lucy escape him. When they start to burst all around him, he runs away, tripping and falling to his death. Lucy comforts him as he dies, then uses the water to clean him and covers his face with a napkin. Lysistrata sends her food, and she grabs it and runs away. The mentors gather for a meal, discussing the game's progress as Lucky reads off a list of mentor-tribute pairs on screen. Coriolanus returns home but doesn’t want to tell Tigris what happened to him. She tells him that his shirt gave him away, and that she has bad news. The tax bill has come, and they are about to lose their home.
Chapter 18
Coriolanus and Tigris have six weeks to pay their taxes and no way to get the money. Tigris insists Coriolanus focus on winning the Plinth Prize for financial relief. Coriolanus has a troubled night, filled with violent dreams about the arena. Later, at the Academy, mentors prepare for the day's broadcast. During his interview Coriolanus praises Lysistrata for her handling of Jessup's rabies situation, and Lucy for her compassion and kindness to Jessup at his death.
Everyone watches as onscreen, tributes strategize and form alliances. Reaper and Lamina make a friendly trade, and Coral, Mizzen and Tanner share food. Dean Highbottom remarks to Lucky on live TV that the new arena has changed the Games, making people more willing to work together. Coral, Mizzen and Tanner then ambush Lamina, whom Coral kills. As the three celebrate over Lamina’s body, Coral kills Tanner with the same trident. Everyone is stunned at the betrayal. Later, Coriolanus visits the Citadel for a medical check-up. He learns about the death of his classmate Gaius Breen from complications related to his loss of both legs from the Arena bombing. Dr. Gaul briefly examines Coriolanus’s arm and reminds him he owes her a paper on the “C” topic. In the lab, Coriolanus overhears talk about the Games from lab techs, and sees a tank of genetically engineered snakes like the ones that bit Clemensia. He realizes, appalled, that they are going to be released into the arena. Hoping they’ll recognize her scent, he drops Lucy’s handkerchief into the snake tank.
Analysis
The thread of Dr. Gaul's theory that humans are inherently violent and chaotic runs through this novel. So does Coriolanus's relationship with the idea. After their escape from the arena, the boys are taken by car to the Citadel, where Dr. Gaul has a clinic in her lab. Gaul asks Coriolanus how he felt in the arena when he smashed in another child's face with a 2x4. He tells her that he was terrified, but that the experience also gave him a useful insight into his own capacity for violence. He had not been aware of how he would react in a situation where he was forced to defend himself or die. The way he felt when he was killing Bobbin made him understand the mutual hatred between the Capitol and the Districts in a much more real way. Previously, he had just felt distaste for the tributes and an abstract hatred for the Districts because of the effects they had on his life and his home. The war had robbed him of all of his social status, and both of his parents. However, after being in the arena and killing Bobbin, he felt an overwhelming sense of disgust and fury with every District in Panem. He says he “wanted every single tribute dead.” Rather than being shocked, Dr. Gaul approves, saying that she had thought for a long time that he needed to have that experience. She didn't need to send him after Sejanus, but forcing him to experience the violence of the arena was, in her opinion, worth the risk to his life.
There are lots of places in this book where the narrator emphasizes the effects of inequality between Capitol and District, but there's no comparison as direct as the one that appears in Chapter 16. After Sejanus has come back safely from near death in the Arena, his extremely wealthy father goes on the pre-show discussion to announce that he is sponsoring a new prize for the winning mentor of the Hunger Games. Mr. Plinth says that he's going to sponsor a full ride to the university for the mentor whose tribute is last to die. This has the additional effect, the narrator tells us, of giving the Hunger Games two winners every cycle. Previously, participation had only been beneficial for the mentors in terms of their social standing and their chances of winning an Academy prize that most wealthy Capitol students didn’t need. The Plinth Prize means a direct financial reward for excellent performance. In a way, in offering this Mr. Plinth has gamified an aspect of the Hunger Games that had not previously been a competition.
This generous reward, which is followed by a series of incredibly brutal tribute deaths, once again highlights the staggering differences between Capitol children and District tributes. The "reward” for nearly every tribute is a violent death, and the reward for the tribute who wins the Games is simply their survival. Considering the fact that their tributes’ lives are at stake, it seems absurd that the mentors would need an additional incentive to try to win the Games, but the fact that death of their tribute isn’t enough of a punishment to incentivize them drives home the fact that other than Coriolanus and Sejanus, none of the mentors think of their tributes as people worth saving.
As she describes the conditions in which rabies reemerged in the Capitol, Collins gives her reader a bit of context with which to understand the financial and resource crises the people of Panem are still experiencing. Tanner’s death is quickly followed by a tragic scene where it’s revealed that Jessup has rabies. People didn't have resources to dedicate to vaccinating their pets when a new strain of rabies emerged, and because of this, 12 Capitol citizens died of a disease that was previously very rare. Jessup is not even the first tribute in this version of the Hunger Games to die of causes that aren't directly related to in-arena violence: Dill dies of pneumonia and exposure on the first day. Although Jessup does trip and fall over the side of the stadium to his death, it's actually the hydrophobia (fear of water, a rabies symptom) that leads to his disorientation and fatal loss of balance. The fact that the Capitol has money to spend on Dr. Gaul’s work genetically engineering snakes to hunt humans, but none to provide help to its citizens to prevent rabies, is another indication of how harsh and self-interested Panem’s high society is.
