Chapter 616: If She Could Have Felt Him

The memory shifted into a cobblestone square, framed by stone buildings draped in Viremont banners.

Hundreds of people. Packed shoulder to shoulder, filling every available inch of space between the buildings, pressed against walls and balanced on ledges and craned forward with the specific, awful attention of a crowd that had assembled to watch suffering and had convinced itself the watching was mandatory.

A wooden post stood in the center of the square.

"By order of King Viremont, the slave known as Silverveil is hereby sentenced to forty lashes for her crime."

Fin’s blood went cold.

He moved before he thought. His body launched toward the post, toward her, every instinct overriding the fact that he was a ghost in a memory that had already happened. His hands reached for the ropes at her wrists and passed through them like water through a sieve.

He couldn’t touch her. He couldn’t untie her. He couldn’t do a goddamn thing.

"Let every collar in this square remember what freedom costs. You run, you will be caught. There is no mercy."

Her wrists were bound to the post. Her shirt had been torn down the back, exposing a spine he could count every vertebra of, every rib, every bone that should have been hidden beneath muscle and wasn’t because the muscle had been eaten by months of starvation.

A man stood behind her with a whip.

The man was calm. The calm was professional. The calm of a man who had done this enough times that the doing had become procedural, a task on a schedule, a box to tick between lunch and the evening shift.

"STOP." He roared it into the square. Full volume. The command of a king whose voice had ended battles and frozen soldiers mid-stride. "STOP. Look at me. LOOK AT ME, you fucking coward."

The man with the whip didn’t flinch. Didn’t pause. Didn’t hear. The sound of Fin’s voice hit the memory like a fist hitting fog, absorbed, dispersed, gone.

He screamed it again anyway.

CRACK.

The sound split the square. Leather on skin. The whip connected with her back and her body jerked against the post with a violence that snapped her head forward. A cry tore from her throat, high and thin, bitten off at the end because she was trying to hold it, trying to swallow it, trying to deny the man behind her the satisfaction of the full sound.

Fin’s hands shook.

He stepped between her and the whip. Planted himself directly in the path, feet spread, shoulders squared, the stance of a man whose body knew how to be a wall even when the wall was made of smoke.

The second lash passed through his chest and hit her anyway.

CRACK.

The sound she made went through him too.

Same spot. The whip found the welt from the first strike and reopened it, and her legs buckled. The ropes at her wrists were the only thing holding her upright, and the ropes didn’t care that the wrists they were attached to belonged to a girl whose body weighed less than the water she’d been carrying at some point before this.

Fin grabbed for the whip. His fingers closed on nothing. He lunged at the man holding it, swinging, and his fist sailed through the man’s jaw without resistance, without impact, without the crunch of bone he needed to hear more than he needed air.

He was screaming. He didn’t know when he’d started. His voice was raw and the raw was useless because the memory didn’t take requests and his rage had no recipient.

Blood ran in thin rivers down her back.

A woman in the crowd turned away. A man pulled his daughter’s face into his hip. An older woman closed her eyes and her lips moved in what might have been a prayer or might have been a curse. Fin couldn’t tell the difference. In this square, they were the same thing.

CRACK.

Her scream cut off into a wet, choking gasp. Her head dropped forward, chin to chest. Her fingers twitched against the rope, reaching for purchase that was never coming.

Nobody stopped it.

Three hundred people stood in a square and watched a child get whipped and NOBODY stopped it, and Fin understood the mechanics, understood the fear, understood that the collars around every neck in this crowd were the same collar around hers and the fear was real and the consequences were real and the math of intervention was a math that ended in death.

He understood it. He didn’t forgive it. Understanding and forgiving occupied different buildings in his chest and the buildings were on fire and the fire was separate.

He tried to shield her with his body. Stood behind her with his back to the whip, arms spread, covering as much of her as his frame could reach. The leather sang through the air and went through him and found her and the sound she made was the sound of a man’s failure delivered in a girl’s voice.

Every lash that passed through him was a lesson in helplessness, and Finnick Shadowclaw had never been helpless in his life, and the learning was destroying him.

He counted. He couldn’t stop himself. The counting was a compulsion, the specific, tactical reflex of a commander whose brain defaulted to data when emotion threatened to override function. Every number was a lash. Every lash was a sound he would hear in his sleep for the rest of his natural life.

Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen.

At twenty-two, she stopped screaming.

Her body still flinched. The muscles responded involuntarily, the autonomic nervous system doing its job after the conscious mind had evacuated the premises. But the sound was gone. She had retreated somewhere behind a wall that Fin recognized because he’d built versions of it himself. The wall that soldiers build. The wall that survivors build.

At twenty-three, he stopped trying to intervene because it was torture of its own kind, the repeated confirmation that he could not stop this, could not change this, could not reach across time and put his body where it belonged: between her and the thing that was breaking her.

So he stood beside her. Close enough that his shoulder overlapped hers. Close enough that if she could have felt him, she would have known someone was there.

She couldn’t feel him. He stood there anyway.