by Kass Morgan
“Everyone back up,” the captor yelled, his voice shaking. He wore a uniform, but he clearly wasn’t a guard. His hair was far longer than regulation length, his jacket fit badly, and his awkward grip on the gun showed that he’d never been trained to use one.
No one moved. “I said back up.”
The numbness that had set in during the long walk from her cell to the launch deck melted away like an icy comet passing the sun, leaving a faint trail of hope in its wake. She didn’t belong here. She couldn’t pretend they were about to head off on some historic adventure. The moment the dropship detached from the ship, Glass’s heart would start to break. This is my chance, she thought suddenly, excitement and terror shooting through her.
Glass unhooked her harness and sprang to her feet. A few other prisoners noticed, but most were caught up watching the drama unfolding atop the ramp. She dashed to the far side of the dropship, where another ramp led back up to the loading deck.
“I’m going with them,” the boy shouted as he took a step backward toward the door, dragging the Chancellor with him. “I’m going with my sister.”
A stunned silence fell over the launch deck. Sister. The word echoed in Glass’s head but before she had time to process its significance, a familiar voice pulled her from her thoughts.
“Let him go.”
Glass glanced at the back of the dropship and froze, momentarily stunned by the sight of her best friend’s face. Of course, she’d heard the ridiculous rumors that Wells had been Confined, but hadn’t given them a second thought. What was he doing here? As she stared at Wells’s gray eyes, which were trained intently on his father, the answer came to her: He must have tried to follow Clarke. Wells would do anything to protect the people he cared about, most of all Clarke.
And then there was a deafening crack—a gunshot?—and something inside of her snapped. Without stopping to think, to breathe, she dashed through the door and began sprinting up the ramp. Fighting the urge to look back over her shoulder, Glass kept her head down and ran as fast as she’d ever run in her Shetlife.
She’d chosen just the right moment. For a few seconds, the guards stood still, as if the reverberation from the gunshot had locked their joints in place.
Then they caught sight of her.
“Prisoner on the run!” one of them shouted, and the others quickly turned in her direction. The flash of movement activated the instincts drilled into their brains during training. It didn’t matter that she was a seventeen-year-old girl. They’d been programmed to look past the flowing blond hair and wide blue eyes that had always made people want to protect Glass. All they saw was an escaped convict.
Glass threw herself through the door, ignoring the angry shouts that rose up in her wake. She hurtled down the passageway that led back to Phoenix, her chest heaving, her breath coming in ragged gasps. “You! Stop right there!” a guard shouted, his footsteps echoing behind her, but she didn’t pause. If she ran fast enough, and if the luck that had been eluding her all her life made a final, last-minute appearance, maybe she could see Luke one last time. And maybe, just maybe, she could get him to forgive her.
Gasping, Glass staggered down a passageway bordered by unmarked doors. Her right knee buckled, and she grabbed on to the wall to catch herself. The corridor was beginning to grow blurry. She turned her head and could just make out the shape of an air vent. Glass hooked her fingers under one of the slats and pulled. Nothing happened. With a groan, she pulled again and felt the metal grate give. She yanked it open, revealing a dark, narrow tunnel full of ancient-looking pipes.
Glass pulled herself onto the small ledge, then scooted along on her stomach until there was room to bring her knees up to her chest. The metal felt cool against her burning skin. With her last milligram of strength, she crept deeper into the tunnel and closed the vent behind her. She strained her ears for signs of pursuit, but there was no more shouting, no more footsteps, only the desperate thud of her heart.
Glass blinked in the near darkness, taking stock of where she was. The cramped space extended straight in both directions, thick with dust. It had to be one of the original air shafts, from before the Colony built their new air circulation and filtration systems. Glass had no idea where it would lead, but she was out of options. She started to crawl forward.
After what felt like hours, her knees numb and her hands burning, she reached a fork in the tunnel. If her sense of direction was right, then the tunnel on the left would lead to Phoenix, and the other would run parallel to the skybridge—onto Walden, and toward Luke.
Luke, the boy she loved, who she’d been forced to abandon all those months ago. Who she’d spent every night in Confinement thinking about, so desperate for his touch that she’d almost felt the pressure of his arms around her.
She took a deep breath and turned to the right, not knowing if she was headed toward freedom or certain death.
Ten minutes later, Glass slid quietly out of the vent and lowered herself to the floor. She took a step forward and coughed as a plume of dust swirled around her face, sticking to her sweaty skin. She was in some kind of storage space.
As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, shapes began to materialize on the wall—writing, Glass realized. She took another few steps forward, and her eyes widened. There were messages carved into the walls.
Rest in peace
In memoriam
From the stars to the heavens
She was on the quarantine deck, the oldest section of Walden. As nuclear and biological war threatened to destroy Earth, space had been the only option for those lucky enough to survive the first stages of the Cataclysm. But some infected survivors fought their way onto the transport pods—only to find themselves barred from Phoenix, left to die on Walden. Now, whenever there was the slightest threat of illness, anyone infected was quarantined, kept far from the rest of the Colony’s vulnerable population—the last of the human race.
Glass shivered as she moved quickly toward the door, praying that it hadn’t rusted shut. To her relief, she was able to wrench it open and began dashing down the corridor. She peeled off her sweat-soaked jacket; in her white T-shirt and prison-issue pants, she could pass for a worker, someone on sanitation duty, perhaps. She glanced down nervously at the bracelet on her wrist. She wasn’t sure whether it would work on the ship, or if it was only meant to transmit data from Earth. Either way, she needed to figure out a way to get it off as soon as possible. Even if she avoided the passages with retina scanners, every guard in the Colony would be on the lookout for her.
Her only hope was that they’d be expecting her to run back to Phoenix. They’d never guess that she would come here. She climbed up the main Walden stairwell until she reached the entrance to Luke’s residential unit. She turned into his hallway and slowed down, wiping her sweaty hands on her pants, suddenly more nervous than she’d been on the dropship.
She couldn’t imagine what he’d say, the look he’d give her when he saw her on his doorstep after her disappearance more than nine months earlier.
But maybe he wouldn’t have to say anything. Perhaps, as soon as he saw her, as soon as the words began to pour out of her mouth, he would silence her with a kiss, relying on his lips to tell her that everything was okay. That she was forgiven.
Glass glanced over her shoulder and then slipped out the door. She didn’t think anyone had seen her, but she had to be careful. It was incredibly rude to leave a Partnering Ceremony before the final blessing, but Glass didn’t think she’d be able to spend another minute sitting next to Cassius, with his dirty mind and even fouler breath. His wandering hands reminded Glass of Carter, Luke’s two-faced roommate whose creepiness only slithered out of the darkness when Luke was out on guard duty.
Glass climbed the stairs toward the observation deck, taking care to lift the hem of her gown with each step. It’d been foolish to waste so many ration points collecting the materials for the dress, a piece of tarp that she’d painstakingly sewn into a silver slip. It felt ut
terly worthless without Luke there to see her in it.
She hated spending the evening with other boys, but her mother refused to let Glass be seen at a social event without a date, and as far as she knew, her daughter was single. She couldn’t understand why Glass hadn’t “snatched up” Wells. No matter how many times Glass explained that she didn’t have those types of feelings for him, her mother sighed and muttered about not letting some badly dressed scientist girl steal him away. But Glass was happy that Wells had fallen for the beautiful if slightly overserious Clarke Griffin. She only wished she could p hd she ctell her mother the truth: that she was in love with a handsome, brilliant boy who could never escort her to a concert or a Partnering Ceremony.
“May I have this dance?”
Glass gasped and spun around. As her eyes locked with a familiar pair of brown ones, her face broke into a wide smile. “What are you doing here?” she whispered, looking around to make sure they were alone.
“I couldn’t let those Phoenix boys have you all to themselves,” Luke said, taking a step back to admire her dress. “Not when you look like this.”
“Do you know how much trouble you’ll get in if they catch you?”
“Let them try to keep up.” He wrapped his arms around Glass’s waist, and as the music from downstairs swelled, he spun her through the air.
“Put me down!” Glass half whispered, half laughed as she playfully hit his shoulder.
“Is that how young ladies are taught to address gentlemen admirers?” he asked, using a terrible, fake Phoenix accent.
“Come on,” she said, giggling as she grabbed his hand. “You really shouldn’t be here.”
Luke stopped and pulled her to him. “Wherever you are is where I’m supposed to be.”
“It’s too risky,” she said softly, bringing her face up to his.
He grinned. “Then we better make sure it’s worth our while.” He placed his hand behind her head and brought his lips to hers.
Glass raised her hand to knock a second time when the door opened. Her heart skipped a beat.
There he was, his sandy hair and deep-brown eyes exactly as she remembered them, exactly as they’d appeared in her dreams every night in Confinement. His eyes widened in surprise.
“Luke,” she breathed, all the emotion of the past nine months threatening to break through. She was desperate to tell him what had happened, why she’d broken up with him and then disappeared. That she’d spent every minute of the nightmarish last six months thinking of him. That she never stopped loving him. “Luke,” she said again, a tear sliding down her cheek. After the countless times she’d broken down in her cell, whispering his name in between sobs, it felt surreal to say it to him.
But before she had a chance to grab hold of any of the words flitting through her mind, another figure appeared in the door, a girl with wavy red hair.
“Glass?”
Glass tried to smile at Camille, Luke’s childhood friend, a girl who’d been as close to him as Glass was to Wells. And now she was here… in Luke’s flat. Of course, Glass thought with a strained kind of bitterness. She’d always wondered if there was more to their relationship than Luke had admitted.
“Would you like to come in?” Camille asked with exaggerated politeness. She wrapped her hand around Luke’s, but Glass felt as if Camille’s fingers had plunged into her heart instead. While Glass had spent moneatad spenths in Confinement pining for Luke until his absence felt like a physical ache, he’d moved on to someone else.
“No… no, that’s okay,” Glass said, her voice hoarse. Even if she managed to find the words, it would be impossible to tell Luke the truth now. Seeing them together made it all the more ridiculous that she’d come so far—risked so much—to see a boy who had already moved on.
“I just came to say hello.”
“You came to say hello?” Luke repeated. “After almost a year of ignoring my messages, you thought you’d just drop by?” He wasn’t even trying to hide his anger, and Camille dropped his hand. Her smile hardened into a grimace.
“I know. I’m—I’m sorry. I’ll leave you two alone.”
“What’s really going on?” Luke asked, exchanging a look with Camille that made Glass feel both desperately foolish and terribly alone.
“Nothing,” Glass said quickly, trying and failing to keep her voice from trembling. “I’ll talk to you… I’ll see you…” She cut herself off with a weak smile and took a deep breath, ignoring her body’s furious plea to stay close to him.
But just as she turned, she saw a flash of a guard uniform out of the corner of her vision. She inhaled sharply and turned her face as the guard passed.
Luke pressed his lips together as he looked at something just beyond Glass’s head. He was reading a message on his cornea slip, Glass realized. And from the way his jaw was tightening, she got the sickening sense it was about her.
His eyes widened with understanding, and then horror. “Glass,” he said hoarsely. “You were Confined.” It wasn’t a question. Glass nodded.
He shifted his gaze back to Glass for a moment, then sighed and reached out to place his hand on her back. She could feel the pressure of his fingers through the fabric of her thin T-shirt, and despite her anxiety, her skin thrilled at his touch. “Come on,” he said, pulling her toward him. Camille stepped to the side, looking annoyed, as Glass stumbled into the flat. Luke quickly shut the door behind them.
The small living area was dark—Luke and Camille had been inside with the lights off. Glass tried to push the implications of that fact out of her head as she watched Camille sit down in the armchair that Luke’s great-grandmother had found at the Exchange. Glass shifted uncomfortably, unsure whether to take a seat. Being Luke’s ex-girlfriend somehow felt odder than being an escaped convict. She’d had six months in Confinement to come to terms with her criminal record, but Glass had never imagined what it would be like to stand in this flat feeling like a stranger.
“How did you escape?” he asked.
Glass paused. She had spent all her time in Confinement imagining what she would say to Luke if she ever got the chance to see him again. And now she had finally made her way back to him, and all the speeches she’d practiced felt flimsy and selfish. He was doing fine; she could see that now. Why should she tell him the truth, except to win him back and make herself feel less alone? And so, in a shaky voice, Glass quickly told him about the hundred and their secret mission, the hostage situation, and the chase.
“But I still don’t understand.” Luke shot a glance over his shoulder at Camille, who had given up pretending that she wasn’t paying attention. “Why were you Confined in the first place?”
Glass looked away, unable to meet his eyesmbleet his as her brain raced for an explanation. She couldn’t tell him, not now, not when he’d moved on. Not when it was so obvious he didn’t feel the same way for her.
“I can’t talk about it,” she said quietly. “You wouldn’t underst—”
“It’s fine.” Luke cut her off sharply. “You’ve made it clear that there are lots of things I can’t understand.”
For the briefest of moments, Glass wished she’d stayed on the dropship with Clarke and Wells. Although she was standing next
to the boy she loved, she couldn’t imagine feeling any lonelier on the abandoned Earth than she did right now.
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CHAPTER 5
Clarke
For the first ten minutes, the prisoners were too rattled by the shooting to notice that they were floating through space, the only humans to leave the Colony in almost three hundred years. The rogue guard had gotten what he wanted. He’d pushed the Chancellor’s limp body forward just as the dropship door was closing, and then stumbled into a seat. But from the shocked expression on his pale face, Clarke gathered that gunfire had never been part of the plan.
Yet for Clarke, watching the Chancellor get shot was less alarming than what she’d seen in t
he moments beforehand.
Wells was on the dropship.
When he’d first appeared in the door, she’d been sure it was a hallucination. The chance of her losing her mind in solitary was infinitely higher than the chance of the Chancellor’s son ending up in Confinement. She’d been shocked enough when, a month after her own sentencing, Wells’s best friend, Glass, had appeared in the cell down the row from her. And now Wells, too? It seemed impossible, but there was no denying it. She’d watched him jump to his feet during the standoff, then crumple back into his seat as the real guard’s gun went off and the imposter burst through the door, covered in blood. For a moment, an old instinct gave her the urge to run over and comfort Wells. But something much heavier than her harness kept her feet rooted to the floor. Because of him, she’d watched her parents be dragged off to the execution chamber. Whatever pain he was feeling was no less than he deserved.
“Clarke.”
She glanced to the side and saw Thalia grinning at her from a few rows ahead. Her old cell mate twisted in her seat, the only person in the dropship not staring at the guard. Despite the grim circumstances, Clarke couldn’t help smiling back. Thalia had that effect. In the days after Clarke’s arrest and her parents’ execution, when her grief felt so heavy it was difficult to breathe, Thalia had actually made Clarke laugh with her impression of the cocky guard whose shuffle turned into a strut whenever he thought the girls were looking at him.
“Is that him?” Thalia mouthed now, tilting her head toward Wells. Thalia was the only person who knew everything—not just about Clarke’s parents, but the unspeakable thing that Clarke had done.
Clarke shook her head to signal that now wasn’t the time to talk about it. Thalia motioned again. Clarke started to tell her to knock it off when the main thrusters roared to life, shaking the words from her lips.