After the parachutes explode, Katniss experiences overwhelming pain and drifts through feverish, symbolic visions of fire, water, the dead, and Prim trying to keep her alive. As consciousness slowly returns, Katniss realizes she is in a Capitol hospital with severe burns. Doctors tell Katniss she is physically fortunate compared with what might have happened, but Katniss is devastated by the knowledge that Prim is dead.

During Katniss’s recovery, her trauma leaves her almost completely silent. Dr. Aurelius concludes that Katniss has become a psychological Avox, unable to speak because of emotional shock rather than purely physical damage. While Katniss refuses to ask questions, others give her information: the Capitol fell the day of the bombing, Coin now leads Panem, Snow is imprisoned and awaiting execution, Gale has returned to fighting in District 2, Peeta survived and remains in the burn unit, and Katniss’s mother throws herself into work. Coin also visits and tells Katniss she has “saved” Snow for her, which gives Katniss a single purpose to cling to.

Once released from the hospital, Katniss is housed in the presidential mansion with her mostly absent mother, while Haymitch monitors her. Katniss retreats into old dissociative habits, hiding in dark corners of the mansion and repeating facts about herself to stay anchored in reality. Her grief over Prim and horror at her burned body trap Katniss in a cycle of memory and numbness, but her desire to kill Snow remains the one fixed point in her thinking.

As Snow’s execution approaches, Katniss receives her Mockingjay uniform and bow, though not her arrows. While wandering the mansion, Katniss follows the scent of roses into a guarded section and is stopped outside Snow’s greenhouse prison. Commander Paylor arrives and orders the guards to let Katniss enter, recognizing Katniss’s right to face what is inside. Katniss selects a white rose, intending to place it on Snow before killing him.

Inside the greenhouse, Katniss finds Snow imprisoned but still composed and manipulative. Snow offers sympathy for Prim’s death, then makes a calculated argument: he says he did not order the parachute attack, because bombing Capitol children would have been pointless for him at that stage and only benefited Coin. Snow claims Coin used the attack to destroy the Capitol’s last loyalty to him, seize full power, and that the weapon echoed the double-explosion trap Beetee and Gale had designed. As Katniss recalls that plan, Snow’s accusation opens a devastating possibility that Prim died because of Coin’s strategy, not Snow’s. Katniss finally speaks for the first time since Prim’s death to deny him, and Snow reminds Katniss that they had once agreed not to lie to each other.