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The jungle was quiet, but it wasn't peace.

It was the kind of silence that comes before something breaks.

Goo felt it in his bones.

He didn't need Capitol sensors or hovercams to tell him. The Game was gone—but the hunt wasn't over.

He and Rue moved to higher ground after the signal flare. Not to hide, but to see. Every movement now was deliberate—each step chosen to leave footprints where they wanted them, not where they were.

They wanted to be found.

By the right people.

By the wrong ones, too.

Goo was baiting both.

"We lit the signal," Rue whispered, crouching beside a ridge. "So what now?"

Goo pulled out what was left of the Capitol drone—its cracked casing still carrying enough power to boost shortwave reception. He connected it to the flare beacon's receiver, rerouting its output into the drone's gutted core.

"We listen," he said.

The device crackled to life—static at first.

Then a low pulse.

Repeating. Mechanical.

Not Capitol code.

Something older.

...--..//D13_ACTIVATED//ECHO-LINE//STANDBY

Rue leaned closer. "What's that mean?"

"It means someone heard us," Goo said.

He didn't smile. He never smiled unless someone was bleeding.

But he almost did now.

Elsewhere, deep beneath the Arena's false terrain, the Capitol's emergency networks were firing blind.

Unauthorized signals were appearing across the board—phantom frequencies, unstable encryption bursts, blackouts on every camera within a 3-kilometer radius of the Spire's collapse.

Every attempt to isolate Goo Kim returned the same response:

UNTRACKABLE.

NO ACTIVE TRIBUTE FOUND.

And in one secure Capitol console—long dormant—a red light flickered for the first time in years.

A whisper from beneath the rubble of history.

District 13 wasn't just listening.

It was moving.

Cassia moved, too.

Not out of rage. Not out of fear.

But calculation.

She'd seen the signal.

And for the first time, she believed someone might actually end the Games without winning them.

That terrified her.

Because it meant her kind of power—survival by domination—was becoming obsolete.

She needed to see him. Goo. The ghost. The error.

She needed to understand what he was becoming.

And she would.

That night, the Capitol launched its last failsafe.

A new phase.

They called it the Red Hour—an Arena-wide sequence meant to force confrontation. Fires, collapsing zones, forced narrowing.

But something was wrong.

Because the system never triggered.

Instead, in the Capitol control room, the screens turned to static.

Then—just once—displayed something impossible:

G00_K11M: Echo Protocol active.

Countdown: 6 hours.

Goo closed the drone core gently and looked to Rue.

"They're coming," he said.

She nodded. Her voice was barely a whisper.

"Then let's end it."