by Kass Morgan
He wasn’t the brave knight who’d come to rescue the princess. He was the reason she’d been locked away in the dungeon.
Wells glanced at his collar chip for the fourteenth time since he’d sat down two minutes earlier. The message Clarke had sent him earlier that day had sounded anxious, and she’d been acting strange for the past few weeks. Wells had barely seen her, and the few times he managed to track her down, she’d been practically twitching with nervous energy.
He couldn’t help but worry that she was about to break up with him. The only thing that kept the anxiety from burning a hole through his stomach was the knowledge that she probably wouldn’t have chosen the library to dump him. It’d be cruel to tarnish the spot they both loved best. Clarke wouldn’t do that to him.
He heard footsteps and rose to his feet as the overhead lights flickered back on. Wells had been still for so long that the library had forgotten his presence, the dim safety lights on the floor providing the only light. Clarke approached, still wearing her scrubs, which normally made him smile—he loved that she didn’t spend hours stressing over her appearance, like most girls on Phoenix—but the blue top and pants fell too loosely from her frame, and there were dark circles under her eyes.
“Hey,” he said, stepping forward to kiss her lightly in greeting. She didn’t move away, but she didn’t kiss him back. “Are you okay?” he asked, even though he knew full well that she wasn’t.
“Wells,” she said, her voice breaking. She blinked back tears. His eyes widened in alarm. Clarke never cried.
“Hey,” he murmured, putting his arm around her to lead her to the couch. Her legs seemed to buckle beneath her. “It’ll be okay, I promise. Just tell me what’s going on.”
She stared at him, and he could see her urge to confide in him battling her fear. “I need you to promise me that you won’t say anything about this to anyone.”
He nodded. “Of course.”
“I’m serious. This isn’t gossip. This is real, life-or-death.”
Wells squeezed her hand. “Clarke, you know you can tell me anything.”
“I found out…” She took a breath, closed her eyes for a moment, and then started again. “You know about my parents’ radiation research.” He nodded. Her parents were in charge of a massive ongoing study meant to determine when, if ever, it would be safe for humans to return to Earth. Whenever his father had spoken of an Earth mission, Wells had thought of it as a distant possibility, more of a hope than a real plan. Still, he knew how important the Griffins’ work was to the Chancellor and to the whole Colony. “They’re doing human trials,” Clarke said softarke ofly. A chill traveled down Wells’s spine, but he said nothing, just tightened his grasp on her hand. “They’re experimenting on children,” Clarke finally said, her voice barely a whisper.
Her voice was hollow, as if the thought had been circulating for so long, it no longer held any meaning. “What children?” he asked, his brain racing to understand.
“Unregistereds,” Clarke said, her tear-filled eyes flashing with sudden anger. “Children from the care center whose parents were executed for violating the population laws.” He could hear the unspoken accusation. People your father killed.
“They’re so young.…” Clarke’s voice trailed off. She sank back and seemed to shrink, as if the truth had taken some part of her with it.
Wells slid his arm behind her, but instead of recoiling as she’d done every day over the past few weeks, she leaned into him and rested her head against his chest. “They’re all so sick.” He could feel her tears seeping through his shirt. “Some of them have already died.”
“I’m so sorry, Clarke,” he murmured as he searched for something to say, anything to make her pain go away. “I’m sure your parents are doing their best to make sure it’s…” He paused. There weren’t any words that could make it better. He had to do something, to put a stop to it before the guilt and horror destroyed her. “What can I do?” he asked, his voice becoming firm.
She bolted upright and stared at him, a different kind of terror filling her eyes. “Nothing,” she said with a resolve that took him by surprise. “You have to promise me that you’ll do nothing. My parents made me swear not to tell anyone. They didn’t want to do this, Wells. It wasn’t their choice. Vice Chancellor Rhodes is making them. He threatened them.” She grabbed Wells’s hands. “Promise me you won’t say anything. I just…” She bit her lip. “I just couldn’t keep it from you anymore. I had to tell someone.”
“I promise,” he said, though his skin was growing warm with fury. The slimy bastard had no right to go around the Chancellor like that. He thought of his father, the man who had an unflinching sense of right and wrong. His father never would have approved human trials. He could put a stop to it immediately.
Clarke stared at him, searching his eyes, and then gave him a small, trembling smile that vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared. “Thank you.”
She returned her head to Wells’s chest, and he wrapped his arm around her. “I love you,” he whispered.
An hour later, after he’d walked Clarke home, Wells headed back along the observation deck alone. He needed to do something. If something didn’t change soon, the guilt would destroy her, and he refused to stand by and watch.
Wells had never broken a promise before. It was something his father had impressed upon him from an early age—a leader never goes back on his word. But then he thought of Clarke’s tears, and knew he didn’t have a choice.
He turned around and begaros, and knean walking toward his father’s office.
They filled the water jug at the stream and started to make their way back to the camp. After giving enough one-word answers, Wells had gotten Octavia to stop asking about Clarke, but now she was walking along sullenly, and he felt guilty. She was a sweet girl, and he knew she meant well. How had she wound up here?
“So,” Wells said, breaking the silence, “what could you have possibly done to end up in Confinement?”
Octavia looked at him in surprise. “Haven’t you heard my brother talking about it?” She gave him a tight smile. “He loves telling people about how I was caught stealing food for the younger kids in the care center—the little ones who are always bullied into giving up their rations—and how the monsters on the Council Confined me without batting an eye.”
Something in Octavia’s voice gave him pause. “Is that really how it happened?”
“Does it matter?” she asked with a weariness that suddenly made her seem older than fourteen. “We’re all going to think what we want about each other. If that’s the story Bellamy needs to believe, then I’m not going to stop him.”
Wells stopped to rearrange the heavy water jug. Somehow, they’d ended up in a different part of the woods. The trees grew even closer together here, and he could see far enough ahead to tell how far they’d strayed.
“Are we lost?” Octavia glanced from side to side, and even in the dim light he could see the panic flash across her face.
“We’ll be fine. I just need to—” He stopped as a sound shuddered through the air.
“What was that?” Octavia asked. “Are we—”
Wells cut her off with a shush and took a step forward. It sounded like a twig snapping, which meant that something was moving just behind the trees. He kicked himself for not bringing a weapon. It would’ve been nice to bring back his own kill, to show that Bellamy wasn’t the only one who could learn how to hunt. The sound came again, and Wells’s frustration turned to fear. Forget catching dinner—if he wasn’t careful, he and Octavia might become dinner themselves.
He was about to grab her hand and run away when something caught his eye. A glint of reddish gold. Wells lowered the water jug and took a few steps forward. “Stay here,” he whispered.
Just ahead, he could see an open space beyond the trees. Some kind of clearing. He was about to shout the name hovering on his lips when he froze, skidding to a stop.
Clarke was standing in the g
rass, locked in an embrace with none other than Bellamy. As she brought her lips up to the Waldenite, fury tore through Wells. Heat shot up through his chest to settle in his racing heart.
Somehow, he managed to wrench his eyes away and stagger back into the trees before a wave of nausea sent his head spinning. He grabbed on to a branch for balance, gasping as he tri
ed to force air into his lungs. The girl he’d risked his life to protect wasn’t just kissing someone else—she was kissing the hothead who may have gotten his father killed.
“Whoa.” Octavia’s voice came from beside him. “Their walk looks a lot more fun than ours.”
But Wells had already turned and begun walking in the other direction. He was vaguely aware of Octavia scampering after him, asking something about a medicine chest, but her voice was drowned out by the pulsing y t to brinof blood in his head. He didn’t care whether they’d found the missing medicine. There was no drug strong enough to repair a broken heart.
ʀublishe
ʀublishe
ʀublishe
CHAPTER 18
Clarke
By the time Clarke and Bellamy returned to camp with the medicine, darkness had fallen. She’d only been in the woods for a few hours, but as they stepped through the tree line into the clearing, it felt like she’d left a lifetime ago.
They’d spent most of the walk back in silence, but every time Clarke’s arm accidentally brushed against Bellamy’s, electricity seemed to dance across her skin. She’d been mortified after their kiss, and had spent the next five minutes stammering an apology while he grinned. Eventually, he cut her off with a laugh and told her not to worry about it. “I know you’re not the type of girl to make out with random guys in the woods,” he’d said with a mischievous grin, “but maybe you should be.”
But as they approached the clearing, all thoughts of the kiss were pushed aside by the shadowy outline of the infirmary tent. Clarke took off with the medicine tucked under her arm.
The tent was empty except for a delirious, feverish Thalia, and to Clarke’s surprise, Octavia, who was just settling back in her old cot. “The other tent is just so small,” Octavia was saying, but Clarke couldn’t do more than nod.
She flung the medicine chest onto the floor, filled a syringe, and plunged the needle into Thalia’s arm. Then Clarke turned back to the box, searching for painkillers. She quickly gave Thalia a dose and smiled as her friend’s face relaxed in sleep.
Clarke knelt next to Thalia for a few more minutes, breathing a deep sigh of relief at her steady pulse. For a moment, she looked down at the bracelet on her wrist and wondered if, somewhere up in the sky, someone was monitoring her own heart rate. Dr. Lahiri, perhaps, or another of the Colony’s top doctors, reading the hundred’s vital signs like the day’s news. Surely they had seen that five people had died already.… She wondered if they’d chalk the deaths up to radiation poisoning and rethink their colonization efforts, or if they’d be smart enough to realize they’d been killed because of the rough landing. She wasn’t sure which scenario she preferred. She certainly wasn’t ready for the Council to extend its jurisdiction to Earth. And yet her mother and father had devoted their lives to helping humanity return home. A permanent settlement would mean, in a way, that her parents had succeeded too. That they hadn’t died for nothing.
Finally, she scooped the medicine back into the chest and placed it in the corner of the tent. Tomorrow, she’d find a place to lock it up, but for now, Clarke felt like she could finally rest. If someone was indeed monitoring their body count up in space, she was going to make damn sure they didn’t drop below ninety-five.
She took a few shaky steps and collapsed on her cot without even bothering to take off her shoes.
“Is she going to be okay?” Octavia asked. Her voice sounded far away.
Clarke murmured yes. She could barely open her eyelids.
“What other medicine was in there?”
“Everything,” Clarke said. Or at least, she tried to say it. By the time the word reached her lips, exhaustion had numbed her brain. The laste it wn a thing she remembered was hearing Octavia rise from her cot before falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.
When Clarke awoke the next morning, Octavia was gone, and bright light was streaming in through the tent flap.
Thalia lay on her side, still asleep. Clarke rose with a groan, her muscles stiff from their hike yesterday. But it was a good kind of pain; she’d walked through a forest that hadn’t been seen by a single human being in three hundred years. Her stomach squirmed as she thought about another distinction she’d inadvertently earned—the first girl to kiss a boy on Earth since the Cataclysm.
Clarke smiled as she hurried over to Thalia. She couldn’t wait until she was well enough to hear all about it. She pressed the back of her hand against her friend’s forehead and was relieved to feel that it was cooler than it had been last night. She gently pulled back the blanket to look at Thalia’s stomach. Her skin still showed signs of an infection, but it hadn’t spread any farther. As long as Thalia had a full course of antibiotics, she’d make a full recovery.
It was hard to know exactly, but based on the strength of the light, she guessed that at least eight hours had passed since Thalia’s last dose. She turned and walked over to the corner where she’d stashed the medicine chest, frowning slightly as she realized it was open. Clarke crouched down and inhaled sharply, blinking to make sure her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her.
The chest was empty.
All the antibiotics, the painkillers, even the syringes—they were all gone. “No,” Clarke whispered. There was nothing. “No,” she said again, scrambling to her feet. She ran over to the nearest cot and started to throw the bedding aside, then did the same with her own.
Her eyes landed on Octavia’s cot, and her panic momentarily hardened into suspicion. She hurried over and began rummaging through the pile of blankets. “Come on,” she muttered to herself, but her hands came up empty.
“No.” She kicked the ground. The medicine wasn’t in the tent, that much was clear. But whoever had taken it couldn’t have gone far. There were fewer than a hundred human beings on the planet, and Clarke wasn’t going to rest until she found the thief who was jeopardizing Thalia’s life. She probably wouldn’t have to look very far.
After a quick search of the flat to make sure her parents weren’t home, Clarke hurried to the lab and entered the code. She kept expecting her parents to change the password, but either they didn’t know how often she visited the kids, or they didn’t want to stop her. Perhaps they liked knowing that Clarke was keeping them company.
As she made her way toward Lilly, Clarke smiled at the others, though her chest tightened when she saw how few were awake. Most were growing sicker, and there were more empty beds than there’d been the last time.
She tried to force this thought out of her head as she approached Lilly, but as her eyes locked on her friend, her hands began to tremble.
Lilly was dying. Her eyes barely fluttered open when Clarke whispered her name, and even when her lips moved, she didn’t have the strength to turn the shapes into words.
There were more flaky red patches on her skin, although fewer of them were bleeding, as Lilly no longer had the energy to scratch them. Clarke sat there, fighting a wave of nausea as she watched the irregular rise and fall of her friend’s chest. The worst part was that she knew this was only the beginning. The other subjects had lingered on for weeks, their symptoms growing increasingly gruesome as the radiation poisoning progressed through their bodies.
For a moment, Clarke imagined carrying Lilly to the medical center, where they could at least put her on high-intensity pain medication even if it was too late to save her. But that would be tantamount to asking the Vice Chancellor to execute her parents. Then he’d just find someone else to finish what her mother and father had started. All Clarke hoped was that their research proved conclusive so that the experiments could stop, so that these test subject
s wouldn’t have suffered in vain.
Lilly’s translucent eyelids fluttered open. “Hey, Clarke,” she croaked, the beginnings of a smile flickering on her face before a new wave of pain washed them away.
Clarke reached over and grasped Lilly’s hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. “Hey,” she whispered. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” Lilly lied, wincing as she struggled to sit up.
“It’s okay.” Clarke placed a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t need to sit.”
“No, I want to.” The girl’s voice was strained.
Clarke gently helped her sit, then adjusted the pillows behind her. She suppressed a shudder as her fingers brushed against Lilly’s back. She could feel every vertebra poking out from her sallow skin.
“How did you like the Dickens anthology?” Clarke asked, glancing under Lilly’s bed, where they kept the books Clarke had stolen from the library.
“I only read the first story, the one about Oliver Twist.” Lilly gave Clarke a weak smile. “My vision is…” She trailed off. They both knew that once the subjects had trouble seeing, the end wasn’t far. “But I didn’t like it, anyway. It reminded me too much of the care center.”
Clarke hadn’t asked any questions about Lilly’s life before this. She’d gotten the sense that Lilly didn’t want to talk about it. “Was it really that bad?” she said carefully.
Lilly shrugged. “We all looked out for one another. We didn’t have anyone else. Well, except this one girl. She had a brother, a real-life older brother.” She looked down, suddenly blushing. “He was… nice. He used to bring her things—extra food, pieces of ribbon…”
“Really?” Clarke asked, pretending to believe the comment about a girl with a brother as she brushed a lock of hair off Lilly’s damp forehead. Even this far along in her sickness, Lilly had a flair for the dramatic.