"We're going back out. Now."
Bellamy's voice echoed through the command tent. He was already prepared to go back out there and look for his friends without any delay or permission but still, he wanted to tell the woman who helped them the first time. He didn't particularly care about the chain of command or the legalities of the Ark; he cared about his people and that's it.
"No," Abby said with a strained and firm tone, "Bellamy, sit down. You've just walked through that gate. You're exhausted, and I am not sending a half-cocked rescue party into the dark."
"You don't understand!" Clarke said as she stepped into the tent from behind the boy. "It's not just about Finn and Murphy. It's all of them! Jasper, Monty, Miller and the remaining forty of us they have up there! They are in that mountain right now, and every second we spend arguing here, they could be getting drained. We need to go before there's nothing left to save."
The raw urgency in Clarke's voice made Abby flinch. She saw the desperation, the trauma, and the flickering fire of a leader in her daughter's eyes. For a moment, she wavered, but then she looked at the camp perimeter through the tent flap.
"Camp security comes first," Abby said as her tone hardened. "Chancellor Kane left me in charge, and my orders are to hold this position until his unit returns. We don't have the manpower to storm a mountain and defend this camp at the same time."
Clarke stared at her mother as if she were a stranger. A cold, bitter realization settled over her. Without a word, she spun around and stormed out of the tent, the canvas flapping violently in her wake.
Abby watched her go with an heart aching, before she turned back to Bellamy. He was staring at her with a look of pure, unadulterated disgust.
"What?" Abby asked, her voice defensive.
"You're a hypocrite," Bellamy spat. The word hit the air like a slap. "Jason and the rest of us didn't even hesitate to go after your daughter. We risked everything and i seem to remember you being very helpful when it was your child out there in the woods. But now that Clarke is back? Now that she's safe behind your walls? Suddenly, the rules matter. Suddenly, we're 'adamant' about staying put."
Abby's face flushed with embarrassment, "What would you have me do, Bellamy? I just got her back! You want me to just stand here and watch her walk back into that meat-grinder? I have no clue if she'll return a second time. I am her mother!"
"She doesn't belong to you anymore," Bellamy countered as he stepped into her personal space, "You don't know what we've been through. You don't know what she's seen and here you are, treating her like a fragile child. That isn't going to save her, it's going to break her."
"I KNOW THAT!" Abby shouted at the boy as her composure finally broke. Her hands shook as she gestured toward the gate, "But she is a child! She's a girl who shouldn't be in this kind of situation, not deciding who lives and dies in a war! She shouldn't have that kind of weight on her shoulders!"
A sharp laugh ripped out of Bellamy's throat that was completely devoid of any humor.
Abby blinked, startled, "Is something funny?"
Bellamy looked at her with cold, fridge eyes. "Oh, Abby... your daughter stopped being a child the moment you strapped her into a seat and sent her down here to die. You gave up the right to protect her the day you let that hatch close."
Bellamy didn't wait for a response. He turned on his heel and walked out of the command tent, leaving Abby standing in the center of the room with tears spilling down her cheeks. The silence behind him was heavy with the truth he had just dropped and it was a truth she wasn't ready to face.
The moment he stepped into the cool afternoon air, he found Octavia leaning against a support beam with her arms crossed.
"Charming, isn't she?" Bellamy muttered.
Octavia looked toward the tent flap and shook her head. "She doesn't get it. She looks at us and sees the kids who used to play in the Alpha Station hallways. She doesn't know what the Ground has done to her daughter. She doesn't realize we stopped being children the second we were sentenced to death, the second we hit the atmosphere, and the second we had to take our first lives."
Bellamy sighed at how true and accurate what she said was. He looked at his sister, seeing the same hardened edge in her that he felt in himself, "We're going after them," he said firmly.
"Definitely," Octavia agreed without a second's hesitation.
"But first, we need gear," Bellamy said, his mind shifting into tactical mode. "We need to get Raven, too. If we're lucky, Jason will have reached Murphy and Finn before anything unforeseen happens. We need to be ready to move the second he sends a signal or the second we find them." He looked around the bustling camp. "By the way, where the hell is Raven?"
On the far side of the station, Raven Reyes was hunched over a workbench cluttered with scorched circuitry and tangled wires. Across from her, a technician named Wick, he was sweating over a pile of scrap, trying to piece together a radio beacon.
"Most of these parts are fried, Wick," Raven said, poking a blackened capacitor with a screwdriver. "You're trying to build a masterpiece out of junk that belongs in a furnace."
Wick wiped grease across his forehead, looking exasperated, "We don't exactly have a spare parts warehouse down here, Raven. If we want to find the other Ark stations, we need a boost. This junk is all we've got, what's the alternative?"
Before Raven could tear into his logic, the tent flap pushed open and Clarke stepped in, "Clarke?" Raven frowned, setting her tools down, "What are you doing here?"
"I need to see you," Clarke said and Raven noticed the way the girl's voice dropped to a low, urgent tone.
Raven glanced at the mess on the table, "Uhh, can it wait? I'm kind of in the middle of a junk-yard miracle here."
"No," Clarke said firmly. "It really can't. It's urgent."
Raven blew a stray hair out of her face and looked back at Wick. "Umm, excuse me for a sec."
As she followed Clarke toward the exit, she stopped and pointed a finger at Wick. "Try a manual frequency sweep. Stop trying to automate a system that doesn't have the processing power to think for itself so just go manual. It'll save you time we don't have."
"Manual huh?" Wick muttered as she left the tent. He looked at the pile of scrap. "Right so what the heck am I going to use for that?"
Outside the tent, Raven caught up to Clarke's brisk pace, "What's up? You look like you're ready to punch a hole through a wall."
"We're leaving," Clarke said shortly.
Raven stopped. "What? Really? What did Abby say?"
"Nothing useful," Clarke spat. "She said we can't go. That we have to wait for Kane."
A smirk played on Raven's lips. "And we are definitely not going to listen to her, are we?"
"Nope," Clarke said, finally looking Raven in the eye. "Get your gear ready. Meet me and the others at the back perimeter in ten minutes."
"Okay," Raven nodded, her brain already working through the logistics. "I'll need to do something about the electric fence, too. Can't have the alarms going off while we're sneaking out."
Clarke nodded in agreement. As she turned to find the Blakes, Raven pivoted back toward the tent she had just left.
"Hey, Wick!" she called out, ducking her head back inside. "I need to ask you a favor."
———-
Jason knelt by a cluster of disturbed pine needles, his fingers tracing the not so heavy tread of a boot mark on the soil.
'Murphy,' he thought. The spacing was uneven and he was hurried, but was also trying to be careful. Beside it were the lighter and frantic prints of someone stumbling. That definitely looked like Finn's prints.
Jason stood back up and gave a low hum and that's when he heard a sharp, echoing CRACK shattered the silence of the woods. It wasn't the sound of a falling branch or anything. It was a gunshot.
"What the hell?" Jason hissed and his pupils dilated as he sped toward the sound. Without a second thought, he launched into a sprint, his boots barely touching the ground as he vaulted over mossy logs and wove through the dense brush with the fluid grace of a supersoldier.
He leaped between two massive trees, clearing a thicket of ferns, and skidded to a silent halt at the edge of a high boulder. Below him lay a small, primitive clearing. It looked more like a miniature village of mud-caked huts and thatched roofs. It was small, maybe forty or fifty people at most, with a few scrawny goats tethered to a post.
But it wasn't the village that stopped Jason's heart. It was the chaos in the center of it.
"What the hell are you doing?" Jason whispered to the empty air, his jaw tightening in disbelief.
Below, the scene was a nightmare. A group of Grounders, mostly elders, women, and children were huddled together in a terrified mass. Finn stood over them, his rifle raised, his eyes wide and glazed with a frantic, manic light. He was shoving a terrified old man back into the dirt at gunpoint, his finger twitching on the trigger.
Murphy was there too, but for the first time in his life, he was the voice of reason. He was hovering at Finn's shoulder, hands held out in a placating gesture, his face pale. "Finn, back off! This isn't them! They don't have our people, man!"
Finn didn't seem to hear him. He looked like a man possessed, his breathing was ragged and shallow. On the far side of the clearing, a Grounder man lay facedown in the dirt, a pool of dark blood spreading beneath him. He was already dead.
Jason's eyes narrowed as he saw a young Grounder boy start to rise, his face twisted in a silent scream of defiance. The rest of the hostages began to wail and the panic reached a fever pitch.
Finn spun and leveled the barrel of his rifle toward the boy. His face looked contorted and to Jason, it looked like the boy's sanity was slipping through his fingers as he prepared to pull the trigger again.
Jason didn't shout or say anything because that would be a waste of time and instead, he ran forward.
He ran down the slope just as Finn's finger began to squeeze the trigger and a loud, bone-shaking CRACK echoed through the clearing.