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Haymitch Abernathy wakes on the morning of the reaping in District 12. He briefly heads to the woods (where he works for a bootlegger) before heading to the meadow to spend some time with his beloved girlfriend, Lenore Dove. Lenore Dove asks Haymitch if he could ever imagine a future in which the sun did not rise on another reaping (the ceremony that selects tributes from each district to fight to the death in the Hunger Games) but Haymitch cannot envision a world in which the Capitol is not in power. Lenore Dove gives Haymitch a birthday present, a Covey-made flint striker that he can wear around his neck, before the two of them need to separate and get ready for the reaping. 

Haymitch goes into town, after stopping to buy gumdrops for Lenore Dove, and waits for the reaping to begin. He’s nervous because, to celebrate the fiftieth Hunger Games, there will be double the number of tributes. Drusilla Sickle selects the girls first: Louella McCoy (a thirteen-year-old girl that Haymitch has been close with ever since she was born), and Maysilee Donner (“the most stuck-up girl in town”). Next, Drusilla selects Wyatt Callow and Woodbine Chance. Woodbine attempts to run away and is immediately shot and killed. Haymitch is then selected as his replacement after he tries to protect a protesting Lenore Dove. Plutarch Heavensbee, who is assigned to shoot footage of the District 12 tributes, gives Haymitch a moment to say goodbye to his family in exchange for a few reaction shots. Haymitch gives the gumdrops to Sid to give to Lenore Dove before being herded onto the train with the rest of his fellow tributes. 

Tensions rise on the way to the Capitol, as Haymitch and Louella struggle to decide whether they can trust their fellow tributes and Maysilee fights back against the Capitol's inhumane view of the districts. They arrive at the Capitol and are prepped for the parade. During the ceremony, someone throws a firework into the path of the chariots, startling the horses and causing a crash that kills Louella. Enraged, Haymitch dumps her body at the base of President Snow’s mansion, remembering his father’s advice to an earlier tribute to not let the Capitol paint its propaganda posters with their blood. Later, Haymitch is approached by a twelve-year-old tribute from District Three named Ampert who tells him he is trying to put together an alliance to rival the Careers—tributes from the wealthier districts who train for the Games and usually win. Haymitch is then collected and brought to Twelve’s tribute apartment, where he meets their mentors: Wiress (from District 3) and Mags (from District 4) who won earlier games. 

The next morning, Wiress and Mags strategize with their tributes and ask them what they want out of the Games. Haymitch says he wants to end the Games by proving the tributes are people, just like the Capitol citizens. Later, the tributes all head to the training center. Haymitch introduces Ampert to Wyatt and Maysilee, and Ampert tells Haymitch his father wants to speak to him. His father, Beetee, is a victor from District 3 who is being forced to coach his son to the death in the Games as punishment for trying to sabotage the Capitol's communication system. Haymitch surreptitiously asks Beetee how a person could break the arena. Beetee speaks in code, saying one only needs to disconnect a piece of a circuit to destroy the integrity of a machine. 

The tributes all head to lunch and those from Twelve, Three, Seven, Eight, and Ten all sit together while Ampert explains his plan. He says the Careers win the Games a disproportionate amount of the time, even though they only make up one-quarter of the tributes. Ampert wants the rest of the districts to team up so they can hunt the Careers down instead of letting the Careers hunt them. Haymitch notices the Careers are bullying the injured and frail kids from Six, and invites them to join. They decide to call themselves the “Newcomers” to show they are up to the challenge, even if they haven’t spent their entire lives training for the Games like the Careers. Plutarch collects Haymitch and says President Snow wants to meet with him. 

Plutarch, Snow, and Haymitch meet in the Heavensbee family manor, and Snow unsettles Haymitch with his intimate knowledge of Covey customs. He then tells Haymitch he will have to die in the arena as punishment for his stunt with Louella’s body, but that the manner of his death will be determined by his behavior. He calls in a miraculously alive Louella, but Haymitch realizes she is actually some other girl (likely the child of a traitor) who has been drugged and altered to look like Louella, and that it will be his job to sell the story of her miraculous recovery. Haymitch and “Louella” return to the District 12 apartment. Horrified, they all agree to call her this girl “Lou Lou.”

That night, Haymitch is woken by Beetee, who recruits him into a plot to destroy the arena.   Beetee tells him the arena is essentially a computer, and there is an enormous water tank underneath the northern part of the arena that, if ruptured, could destroy the computer's brain. Haymitch needs to locate a mutt portal (a concealed opening that allows Gamemaker-made creatures to enter the arena), climb down to the utility corridor, and use his striker to blow up the tank with Ampert’s help. They return to the training center the next day, where Haymitch and Maysilee successfully convince the District 9 to join the Newcomers. 

The four then prepare for their upcoming interviews with Caesar Flickerman. Drusilla suggests that Haymitch sell himself to the viewers as a “naughty,” but not a dangerous “rascal.” The group panics when news arrives that their stylist has bailed, but Effie Trinket, the older sister of one of the members of Haymitch’s prep team, arrives and saves the day. Beetee finds Haymitch in the greenroom and quickly tells him he replaced the black cord in Ampert’s token with a fuse and the sunflower tokens from Nine with explosives. He begins to say that he replaced something else, too, but they are interrupted, and the interviews begin. The Careers try to make themselves look good while making the Newcomers look bad, but the Newcomers manage to come across as clever, eloquent, and united. 

Afterwards, Plutarch takes the four tributes from Twelve back to his mansion to film additional footage. He pulls Haymitch aside and says he hopes to gain Haymitch’s trust. He then hands Haymitch a phone with Lenore Dove on the other line. Lenore Dove tells him she was arrested for singing controversial songs in public, but she is going to be released tomorrow. Haymitch makes her promise she will not do anything to get herself killed, and they exchange declarations of love before the connection is lost. Afterwards, Plutarch tells Haymitch the mutt portals in the arena will be concealed by berms of flowers. The four tributes are taken back to the apartment, and Haymitch upsets Maysilee and Wyatt by saying he is going to go off alone in the arena because the Capitol is targeting him. 

The next morning, all forty-eight tributes are taken to the arena, which resembles an idyllic meadow with a mountain on one side and woods on the other. Haymitch takes off, after snagging a backpack filled with some food and supplies, and starts to head north to look for mutt portals. He soon discovers that nearly everything in the arena is poisonous. That night, he learns that twenty tributes died in the bloodbath; Wyatt was one of them. Lou Lou finds him the next morning, but she is soon killed after breathing in poisonous pollen from a berm of flowers. Haymitch is then set upon by vicious butterflies but manages to follow them back to their portal and wedges a branch in its jaws before it can fully close. 

He is soon reunited with Ampert and they are able to enact their plan. Haymitch manages to climb down the mutt portal and ignite the tank, but Ampert is killed by carnivorous squirrels. The arena starts to glitch shortly afterward and he briefly celebrates before a backup generator outside the arena takes over. The next morning, Haymitch decides to try to escape from the arena and destroy the generator. He comes to a hedge at the end of the arena and attempts unsuccessfully to fight his way through the maze. He returns to the arena just in time to be ambushed by a pack of Careers. He manages to take down two of them, but is nearly killed by the third when Maysilee appears and kills his attacker with a poison dart. 

Haymitch and Maysilee decide to work together and share a heartfelt moment of camaraderie in which Haymitch says he has come to think of Maysilee as a sister. In the morning, Haymitch and Maysilee try to enter the hedge again but they are thwarted. Later, they make a promise that one of them will win so that they can become the “worst victor in history” by refusing to play the Capitol's games. The next day, Haymitch convinces Maysilee to help him get through the hedge by covertly telling her it’s something he needs to do to get back at the Capitol. They manage to fight their way through and they come to a hundred-foot cliff, with the generator nestled in the rocks below. 

Maysilee says they should leave, but Haymitch wants to stay because this stretch of ground is not part of the arena and he wants to die in the real world. The two consider separating, because the numbers are dwindling and they don’t want one of them to have to kill the other. Maysilee goes to get their food and Haymitch kicks a rock off of the cliff while he waits. The rock bounces back; he realizes there is a forcefield around the generator. When Maysilee screams, Haymitch finds her being mauled to death by birds. He holds her while she dies and she locks her pinkie around his, a final confirmation of their promise. Haymitch takes one of her necklaces as a memento and realizes that he, a Career named Silka, and a young girl named Wellie are the only ones left. He eventually finds Wellie on the brink of starvation, and the two of them spend the night in a tree. As Wellie sleeps, Haymitch realizes that Beetee also replaced Maysilee’s necklace with a fuse. 

Silka kills Wellie the next day while Haymitch is looking for kindling. The two fight to the death and make it to the cliff’s edge, both wounded. Silka throws an axe, which hits the forcefield and bounces back and kills her. Haymitch, on the brink of death, ignites the explosive and throws it at the generator before losing consciousness. He wakes up back in the Capitol and is paraded around in a golden cage. President Snow crowns Haymitch as the victor, and ominously tells him to enjoy his homecoming. 

Haymitch arrives back in District 12, only to discover that Lenore Dove is still in prison and that Snow had his mother and brother killed by setting his family home on fire. Lenore Dove is released, and Haymitch runs to meet her in the meadow so they can run away together. He finds her there with her geese and watches her pick up a bag of gumdrops, which Haymitch figures she left in the meadow after Sid gave them to her. They embrace and declare their love. Eventually, they sit and Haymitch feeds her one of the gumdrops. Lenore Dove says she can finally eat the ones that he bought her on Reaping Day now that he is home; she has been sleeping with the bag under her pillow. Too late, Haymitch realizes these are not the gumdrops he gave her, but were planted there and poisoned by Snow. Lenore Dove dies. Before she does, she makes Haymitch promise that he will take down the Capitol one day. 

Heartbroken and terrified that Snow will continue to hurt the people close to him, Haymitch succumbs to a life of alcoholism and isolation. One day, he stumbles across anti-Capitol messaging that Lenore Dove painted in an alley and he interprets this as a sign to keep fighting. Plutarch invites Haymitch to join the rebellion during Haymitch’s Victory Tour, and they talk about a future in which they find someone who is finally able to take down the Capitol. 

In the epilogue, which takes place after the events of the original trilogy, a middle-aged Haymitch says he fulfilled his promise to Lenore Dove by helping to destroy the Capitol and everything it represented. He has also learned how to love again and has come to think of Katniss and Peeta as his family. Eventually, Haymitch begins to open up about all the people he loved and lost. The next day, Katniss shows up at his door with goose eggs, and Peeta builds him an incubator so that he can keep geese in Lenore Dove’s memory. Haymitch is more at peace now and he knows that the Capitol could never take Lenore Dove from him because, like the geese, they mated for life.

Previous section Chapter 27 & Epilogue

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