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you may remember, back in last year, when i quit my job i said i would apply for a master's program somewhere in europe. well, i did, and i got accepted to a few of them. so it's been decided recently that come october i will be starting classes in berlin, germany. yay! =)
anyway, it's partly because of this that this chapter took a bit longer than i expected. a lot of my writing time was spent visiting the embassy and looking up flights and apartments online. the other part of the delay was basically the fact that i suck at integrating exposition to my stories in an organic matter. ^^;;; but eh, it has to be done somehow.
it's getting increasingly hard to find excerpts of these newer chapters that won't spoil the entire thing for you guys. eventually i just said screw it-- most of this you're going to find out when i post chapter 18 anyway. so if you'd like to wait for the chapter before reading this excerpt, i'd recommend that (i should be posting 18 tonight), but if you still want to read this, knock yourself out. who am i to judge you when i can't resist spoilers myself. LOL. xD
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It was hard for [Peeta], all this caution and secrecy. He was never very good at recognizing when others were deceiving him-- something his brothers always took advantage of when they were children-- but now he found himself being wary of everybody and everything, and it was weird.
At the same time, he'd always considered himself an open person; he never really felt he had anything to hide from anyone. He had only kept one real secret, and he only kept it to himself because he was afraid of rejection.
[...]
If it could in any way help Katniss, he wouldn't regret it. He could deal with it, and the secrecy and the injections, as long as it made her chances better.
So he got moved to many different safe houses, practically a different location each day. According to Haymitch, he'd be on the move until Katniss's mission was done. "When will we know how it went?" Peeta asked him, just as he was getting into the car. He knew better than to ask how they would know.
"Not right away," Haymitch replied gruffly, "but eventually."
The safe houses he was taken to were small and underground, most of them just one room with bunk beds and a small folding table attached to the wall where he would eat bland canned or dry food. There wasn't much to do but think. He didn't even have a piece of paper to distract himself by drawing something.
They had given him a bag with basic clothes and a wristwatch, which Peeta used to dutifully keep track of the days that passed since he was first moved out of the Training Center. That's how he knew the very day the Games were slated to start was the day they got moved to a much larger safe house. He was moved during the night, actually. Prim would have already spent about six hours in the arena as he walked out of the hovercraft. He hoped she had survived the bloodbath at the Cornucopia. He wished there was a way he could know if she had.
This safe house was a lot more comfortable. It was aboveground for once, and not only could it house up to eight people in two rooms, but it also had a common room which doubled as a conference room, a small kitchen with an actual table where he could eat, and, he found out later, there was a training room in the basement.
He chose one of the rooms to drop off his stuff, but just as he was taking out some cans from the bag he was handed a while back, his foot made contact with something hard under the bed. He looked and found a dark case, large and rectangular in shape, similar to ones he'd seen holding certain musical instruments.
Curious, he pulled it out and onto the bed. He hadn't found anything in any of the previous safe houses he'd been in, so he found it strange that someone had left that case behind. It was heavy. There was a set of keys hanging from a small chain around the handle, and it took him a while to get the right combination, but eventually he managed to open the locks. Nestled inside several layers of protective lining was a wooden bow and a quiver filled with hand-made arrows.
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like i said before, chapter 18 should be uploaded to ff.net sometime tonight!