Chapter Text
The heavy leather flap of the command tent fell shut, cutting off the chaotic roar of the quarry.
Inside, the air was tense. Lexa walked straight past the map table to the small wooden basin in the corner. She stripped off her leather gauntlets, tossing them onto a chair. Anya and Indra followed her inside, the adrenaline of the interrupted execution still radiating from the two veteran generals.
Indra immediately began pacing the length of the tent, her hand gripping the hilt of her sword. "My scouts are restless, Heda. To let an Azgeda archer walk away after breaching our walls... it goes against every instinct they have. Give me the vanguard, and we will scour the woods. We will bring you the assassin's head."
Lexa splashed cold water onto her hands, washing away the frozen dirt of the execution ring. She reached for a cloth, drying her fingers slowly and deliberately. She used the silence to construct her lie, ensuring her face was a mask of absolute, impenetrable calm before she turned to face them.
"There will be no hunt, Indra," Lexa said, her voice smooth and cold.
Indra stopped pacing, her scarred face twisting in frustration. "But Commander—"
"Nia sent a ghost to silence a coward," Lexa interrupted, stepping up to the map table and looking down at the Coalition borders. "If you chase a ghost into the woods, you will find only the traps the Ice Nation has left for you. We do not bleed Trikru warriors to chase shadows."
Indra's jaw tightened, a muscle jumping beneath her skin. She hated the inaction, but she bowed her head respectfully. "As you command."
"Anya," Lexa continued, shifting her gaze to her former mentor. "Send riders to Polis immediately. Tell the ambassadors that Queen Nia assassinates her own envoys rather than let them face justice. By nightfall, I want every clan in the Coalition to know she is a coward."
Anya gave a sharp nod, recognizing the political brilliance of the move. "The Coalition will spit on her name. Nia wanted a martyr, and you have given her a murdered spy."
"Exactly," Lexa said. Having stabilized the immediate crisis and delegated the narrative, Lexa finally unclasped the heavy clasp of her red cape. She draped it over the back of her chair, a subtle physical shift indicating she was stepping down from the role of the executioner.
"Double the watch on the gates," Lexa ordered, walking toward the tent flap. "Keep the warriors busy and focused outward. I am going to check on the Sky People to ensure they do not use this chaos to panic."
Without waiting for a response, the Commander pushed through the canvas and stepped back out into the cold morning air.
Anya immediately moved to the tent flap, pulling it back just a fraction of an inch to watch Lexa's retreating back. Indra stepped up beside her, her deep scowl returning.
They watched as Lexa bypassed the command guards, bypassed the armory, and walked in a perfectly straight, deliberate line across the quarry, heading directly for the medical tent of the Sky Girl.
Anya let the canvas fall shut. She turned to face Indra.
"Azgeda did not fire that arrow," Anya said flatly.
Indra frowned, her hand resting back on the hilt of her sword. "The arrow was real, Anya. I saw it myself. Heavy iron tip, thick wood, blue and grey fletching. That was true Ice Nation craftsmanship. It cannot be faked."
"The weapon was real," Anya agreed, walking back over to the map table. She tapped the center of the quarry where the dais stood, then dragged her finger up to the northern ridge. "But the shooter was not Azgeda. Look at the trajectory, Indra. It was a steep, downward angle. The wind was coming off the river. To make that precision shot with a heavy Azgeda arrow, you have to be standing exactly here." She tapped the northern ridge again.
Indra's eyes narrowed as she followed Anya's finger. "Above the vanguard's sightlines."
"Inside the walls," Anya corrected, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "The perimeter was flawless, Indra. No Ice Nation scout slipped past my guards. The shooter was already inside our camp."
Indra froze. Her mind, honed by decades of warfare, processed the information with brutal efficiency. A real Azgeda arrow. Fired from inside the Trikru camp. "Who inside our walls would possess an Ice Nation arrow?" Indra asked, her voice low.
And then, the memory surfaced, hitting both generals at the exact same time.
"The skirmish two days ago," Indra breathed, her scarred face paling slightly. "The Sky Girl fought beside the Commander. They killed an Azgeda scout."
"She scavenged the arrow from the corpse," Anya confirmed, her tactical mind slotting the final piece of the puzzle into place.
The two generals stood in the dim light of the tent, the reality settling over them not with awe, but with a cold, creeping alarm.
It hadn't been an Ice Nation assassin. It had been Clarke.
"She executed a prisoner of the Commander," Indra snarled, her anger flaring instantly. "In the center of our camp. She bypassed our security and took Trikru justice into her own hands using a stolen weapon."
"But you must admit, Indra, it was a brilliant maneuver," Anya pointed out, a reluctant, dark gleam of respect settling into her sharp eyes. "She took Queen Nia's own trap and flipped the board completely."
Indra paced a tight circle, her scarred face twisting in frustration. "It is not her place to solve our problems! She is a child from the sky! She is unpredictable. A rogue element."
"Perhaps not, but she solved it flawlessly," Anya countered pragmatically, leaning over the map table. "If Heda had executed Quint, Nia would have her martyr. If Heda spared him, it would have shown weakness. The Sky Girl saw the snare, stole the perfect weapon to frame Azgeda, and removed the bait without spilling a single drop of Trikru blood. Nia's plan is in ashes, and the Coalition is stronger for it."
Indra gripped her sword, her knuckles turning white. She hated the deception. She hated the lack of discipline. But above all, she hated that a stranger had outmaneuvered an Ice Nation Queen so easily.
"And Heda..." Indra stopped, looking toward the tent flap where Lexa had disappeared. "Heda knows. She stopped the hunt before it even began. She went straight to the girl's tent to protect her."
Anya crossed her arms, her tactical mind working furiously. "The Commander is using the kill to humiliate Nia and keep the Coalition intact. If we expose the Sky Girl, we expose Heda's lie. The alliance fractures, and Trikru looks weak."
"This girl is a blade without a hilt, Anya," Indra warned, her voice low and dangerous. "She is ruthless, yes. She is cunning. But she does not respect our ways. If Heda continues to protect her, she will eventually cut the hand that holds her."
Anya looked down at the map, thinking of the pale, blonde girl who had walked into their camp and quietly rewritten the rules of their war.
"Then we must make sure she remains pointed at our enemies," Anya said grimly. "Keep the warriors focused on the Ice Nation. Let Nia take the blame for her own arrow. But from now on, Indra... we watch the Sky Girl. Closely."
Indra struck her chest with a closed fist, a salute bound by duty, not admiration. "She takes one step against Trikru, and I will end her myself."
The smell of ozone and burning copper was usually Raven's favorite scent. It meant progress. It meant order. But right now, it was the only thing keeping her tethered to a reality that had fundamentally fractured.
She lay on her back on the dirt floor of the canvas tent, a flashlight gripped tightly between her teeth. Above her rested the gutted remains of her pod's communications unit. Her hands moved over the exposed wires, but they were shaking. Not a slight tremor, but a deep, vibrating unsteadiness that made splicing the delicate copper agonizingly difficult.
I watched you die. All of you.
Raven squeezed her eyes shut. She forced the ghost of Clarke's voice out of her head and focused on the red wire. Just the red wire. Basic circuitry. Don't think about the math. Don't think about the fact that your best friend is a hundred-year-old ghost.
"You okay down there, Rae?"
Monty's voice floated down from above, laced with a nervous edge. He was sitting on a crate, holding a mess of scavenged electrical tape. "You've been stripping that same wire for two minutes."
Raven spat the flashlight into her hand, her jaw tight. Before she could answer, the heavy leather flap of the tent was pushed aside.
The massive silhouette of Lincoln filled the entrance for a brief second. He gave a single, sharp nod — a silent confirmation that the perimeter was secure — before stepping back outside to resume his guard, letting the flap fall shut behind Clarke.
Raven slid out from under the table, trying to ignore the fact that Clarke had just dropped time travel right in her face. She sat up, wiping a streak of grease across her forehead, and looked at Clarke.
.
The tense, coiled desperation that had consumed Clarke an hour ago was completely gone. She had washed the dirt from her hands, but the dark, violent bruises remained on her throat. She moved into the tent with a quiet, terrifying calm.
Raven stared at Clarke's blank face. Outside, the distant shouts of the Trikru warriors were still echoing through the camp, furious about an Azgeda assassin. Raven's mind, always looking for the missing variable, put the pieces together instantly.
Raven looked up at Monty. "Monty. I need you to go outside and check the external antenna alignment."
Monty blinked, confused. "But I just checked it—"
"Check it again," Raven snapped, her voice leaving no room for argument. "And stay out there to make sure the wind doesn't knock it out of phase. Go."
Monty frowned, sensing the sudden, heavy tension in the room, but he nodded and slipped out of the tent.
The moment the canvas fell shut, Raven let out a short, ragged breath. Her defensive sarcasm kicked in — her ultimate shield against the impossible.
"So," Raven started, pointing her wire strippers at Clarke, her voice tight and trembling. "I just need to clear a few things up. First: please tell me that the conversation we had earlier was just me experiencing acute hypoxia and hallucinating."
Clarke stopped. She looked at Raven, her blue eyes incredibly sad, but she shook her head slowly. "It wasn't a hallucination, Raven."
Raven swallowed hard, her throat clicking audibly. "Right. Okay. Second question: The dead Grounder outside. The 'Ice Nation assassin'. Did you just casually walk out of here and shoot a guy with an arrow while I was fixing the radio?"
"He was a spy," Clarke said bluntly, offering no apologies and no hesitation. "He was going to tear the Coalition apart. I handled it."
Raven let her head fall back against the wooden support pole. She let out a laugh that sounded more like a sob. "Of course you did. Because you're a time-traveling warlord now. Why wouldn't you?" She rubbed her trembling hands over her face, taking a deep, shuddering breath. "Okay. Fine. I'm putting all of this in a box in my head before my brain literally melts. Do you want to talk to your mom or not?"
Clarke's expression softened, the cold mask slipping just enough to show the desperate daughter underneath. "Is it ready?"
"It's tied directly into the pod's emergency auxiliary core," Raven said, pulling herself up to the makeshift workstation. "It's going to get hot, so don't touch the casing."
Raven pushed a toggle switch. The dead, heavy silence of the tent was suddenly pierced by the beautiful, messy sound of static.
"The frequency is locked," Raven muttered, her hands moving on autopilot now. "We're bypassing the Council's general receiver and broadcasting straight to Engineering." She grabbed the heavy metal microphone and pressed the button. "Alpha Station, this is Raven Reyes on the ground. Do you copy? Over."
Static hissed loudly. For ten agonizing seconds, there was nothing.
Then, a sharp click cut through the white noise.
"Raven? Raven, is that you?" Abby Griffin's voice crackled through the speaker, thick with relief and exhaustion. "We lost you yesterday. We thought the power source... Clarke. Is Clarke there?"
Clarke stepped forward. She gently took the microphone from Raven's hand.
"I'm here, Mom," Clarke said. Her voice trembled slightly on the word Mom, a microscopic crack in her armor, before she forced it into the cadence of a commander. "But you need to listen to me carefully. We don't have much time."
"Clarke, thank God," Abby breathed. A second later, the deep, authoritative voice of Chancellor Jaha joined the channel. "Clarke. We have the engineering teams working on the life support systems, but the Ark is dying faster than projected. We are preparing the Exodus ship."
"Do not board the Exodus ship," Clarke ordered, her voice slicing through the static.
There was a stunned pause on the other end. "What?" Abby asked. "Clarke, it's our only viable transport—"
"It's a trap," Clarke interrupted. "Diana Sydney is staging a mutiny. The second the Exodus ship is prepped, she is going to bypass the staging locks, seal the bay doors from the inside, and launch without you."
"That's impossible," Jaha's voice came back, sharp with denial. "Diana is helping us coordinate the evacuation. Where are you getting this information, Clarke?"
Raven looked at Clarke, her breath catching. She wondered how Clarke was going to explain this without exposing the impossible truth.
Clarke didn't miss a beat. Her voice was cold, logical, and entirely scientific. "Check the telemetry on the Exodus bay doors right now, Jaha. She's locking you out. The staging locks are hardwired to the explosive bolts on the outer hull. If she manually bypassed the locks from the inside to keep you out, she severed the remote detonation for the bolts. It's basic engineering."
Silence hung heavy over the radio.
"If she launches that ship without clearing those bolts," Clarke pressed, her voice vibrating with absolute certainty, "it will clip the ring. It will rip the heat shielding off the hull, and everyone on board will burn up in the atmosphere. Check the codes. She is stealing your ship."
Raven stared at Clarke, completely mesmerized. The lie was flawless. It was highly technical, perfectly logical, and completely impossible to ignore.
"Sinclair," Jaha's voice was muffled, as if he had turned his head away from the mic. "Run a diagnostic on the Exodus bay staging locks. Now."
A long, agonizing minute passed. Clarke stood perfectly still, her grip on the microphone unwavering.
"My God," Abby's voice returned, breathless and horrified. "The locks are overridden. The remote access has been severed from the inside. Jaha is sending the guard to the launch bay—"
A sudden, deafening screech of tearing metal and blaring alarms erupted through the radio speaker, making Raven flinch backward.
"Hull breach in Bay 4!" Jaha’s voice roared over the chaos in the background. "Seal the bulkheads!"
"What happened?" Clarke demanded, her knuckles turning white around the mic.
"She knew we caught her," Sinclair’s voice shouted over the static. "She tried to manually blow the explosive bolts before the bay doors were fully open! The Exodus ship is crippled in the dock, but the blast took out our primary atmospheric scrubbers. We are venting oxygen!"
"Clarke," Abby’s voice was trembling now, the harsh reality of space closing in on her. "We don't have days anymore. Life support will fail completely in a matter of hours. We have to force an emergency separation of the stations immediately."
"If we do a blind drop now," Sinclair warned frantically, "the stations will scatter. We don't know the terrain. We don't know the radiation zones."
"I do," Clarke said, her voice slicing through their panic with absolute authority. She looked at Raven and gave a sharp nod.
Raven immediately leaned over the console, her fingers flying across the keypad as she initiated a data transfer.
"Raven is transmitting a set of coordinates right now," Clarke continued. "It's a clearing just east of this quarry. The terrain is flat, and the radiation levels are safe. But more importantly, it is inside Trikru territory. The Grounders have armies down here. If you drop blindly into Ice Nation territory, they will slaughter you before you even unbuckle your harnesses. Lock onto Raven's ping. You have to land in these exact coordinates."
The radio crackled with the sound of blaring alarms. "Coordinates received and locked," Sinclair reported breathlessly.
"Clarke," Abby said, her tone a mix of overwhelming relief and deep, maternal fear. "We're coming down. God help us, we're coming down."
"Bring our people home, Mom," Clarke said softly. "Clarke out."
She reached out and killed the connection. The radio went dead, the static cutting off abruptly.
The silence that rushed back into the tent was absolute.
Clarke slowly set the microphone down on the crate. Her shoulders slumped, the adrenaline of the transmission finally leaving her body. For a second, she looked incredibly tired.
Raven didn't say anything. She stared at Clarke's hands — the hands that had just saved the Ark with a flawless, calculated lie, the same hands that had just killed a man to save an alliance. Raven's own hands were still trembling, coated in engine grease and dirt.
She realized then that the Clarke Griffin she knew on the Ark — the privileged, artistic girl who liked to draw — was entirely gone. The person standing in front of her was a survivor who had carried the weight of the world, watched it burn, and come back to carry it again.
Raven looked away, focusing on the sparking wires of the radio. She didn't know how to process the magic or the time travel. But she knew how to process survival.
"Better start packing," Raven muttered, her voice rough, finally letting the reality of what they had just done sink in. "When those stations hit the ground, this forest isn't going to be big enough for all of us."
Clarke pushed through the heavy canvas flaps of the communications tent, stepping out into the biting cold of the afternoon.
The Trikru camp was still buzzing with a restless, chaotic energy from the morning's execution, but around the Sky People's tents, the atmosphere was different. A tense, expectant silence hung in the air.
Monty was standing right where Raven had left him, his hands numb as he gripped the base of the salvaged antenna. He looked up, his breath pluming in the cold air. "Did it work? Did you get the warning to them about Diana?"
"We got it to them," Clarke said, her voice steady but carrying the heavy weight of exhaustion. "Diana is stopped. The Exodus ship won't burn."
Monty let out a massive, shuddering sigh of relief, dropping his forehead against the cold metal of the antenna.
A few yards away, leaning against a barricade of supply crates, was Bellamy.
He didn't look panicked, and he didn't look like a cornered animal. He was wearing his guard jacket, his arms crossed over his chest, watching Clarke with a dark, unreadable expression. He already had his pardon from Chancellor Jaha — Clarke had made sure of that days ago — but the rigid tension in his jaw told a different story.
Clarke walked over to him, stopping a few feet away.
"So," Bellamy said, his voice low, scraping against the ambient noise of the camp. "They're prepping the descent. The Council is coming down."
"It's going to take them time to coordinate the separation of the stations," Clarke replied quietly, leaning her back against the crate next to him. "Hours. Maybe a day. But yes. They're coming to the coordinates we gave them."
Bellamy looked out at the camp, at the teenagers who had spent the last few weeks bleeding, fighting, and surviving under his and Clarke's command. "Pardon or no pardon, Clarke, you know how the Council works. The second Jaha and Kane step out of that metal box, we stop being the leaders of this camp. We go right back to being delinquents. I go back to being a janitor. They're going to take one look at this setup and try to put us all back in line."
"They can try," Clarke said.
The cold, absolute certainty in her voice made Bellamy turn his head to look at her.
"Up there, Jaha was a god," Clarke continued, her blue eyes scanning the massive, heavily armed Trikru warriors patrolling the quarry perimeter. "Down here, he's just a man stepping into a warzone he doesn't understand. The Council doesn't know the terrain. They don't know the politics. They don't know how to survive the winter. And they definitely don't have a working alliance with the Commander of the Twelve Clans."
She turned her head to meet Bellamy's dark eyes.
"You aren't a janitor down here, Bellamy. You're my second-in-command. Jaha's pardon keeps you out of chains, but I keep you in power. When they land, we don't hand over the keys. We tell them how things work on the ground."
Bellamy stared at her. The deep-seated, class-based inferiority complex he had carried his entire life warred with the reality of the girl standing next to him. She wasn't just planning for survival anymore; she was planning for a political takeover of her own people.
Slowly, the rigid tension in Bellamy's shoulders relaxed. A fierce, loyal smirk touched the corner of his mouth. "Whatever you say, Princess."
"Keep the perimeter secure," Clarke ordered softly. "Make sure our people are ready to pack up and move when we see the entry trails in the sky. I have to go talk to Lexa."
Bellamy nodded once, pushing off the crate to get to work.
Clarke took a deep breath, letting the cold air fill her lungs, and turned her attention to the center of the quarry.
Lexa was standing just outside her command tent, flanked by Anya and Indra. The Commander was watching Clarke with an intense, calculated gaze, clearly aware that the Sky Girl had just emerged from the communications tent where the strange, metallic box was kept.
Clarke walked across the frosted dirt, ignoring the hostile glares of the Trikru generals, and stopped a respectful distance from Lexa.
"Commander," Clarke said smoothly, inclining her head.
"Clarke of the Sky People," Lexa replied, her green eyes giving nothing away. "Your mechanic has been working on the metal debris all morning. Did she succeed?"
"She did," Clarke confirmed. She didn't flinch, and she didn't sugarcoat it. "I made contact with my people. The remaining stations of our ship are failing. They are preparing to drop from the sky."
Indra's hand instantly went to the hilt of her sword, her scarred face twisting in alarm. Anya took a half-step forward, her eyes narrowing at Clarke.
Lexa didn't move a muscle. "How many?" she asked, her voice dangerously quiet.
"Over two thousand," Clarke said, letting the number hang in the air.
A tense, suffocating silence fell over the Grounder generals. Two thousand people wasn't a scouting party. It was an invasion force. It was enough mouths to drain the hunting grounds dry and enough bodies to challenge the local clans.
"Two thousand," Lexa repeated softly, her jaw tightening slightly. "And where exactly are these stations going to fall?"
"I gave them coordinates," Clarke said, holding Lexa's gaze firmly. "A clearing just east of this quarry. It's flat, and it minimizes the risk to your villages."
"You directed an army of two thousand to land on Trikru land without my permission?" Lexa's voice was like ice, the Commander's mask fully in place, projecting strength for the sake of her generals.
"I directed my people to land where I knew I could protect them," Clarke countered, her tone equally firm, refusing to back down. "And where I knew I could control them. If they drop blindly, they scatter into Azgeda territory. Queen Nia will slaughter them, take their weapons, and use their technology against you."
Lexa's eyes narrowed imperceptibly. The strategic truth of Clarke's words was undeniable. Nia with Ark technology would be the end of the Coalition.
"When?" Lexa asked.
"It takes time to prepare a descent of that magnitude," Clarke said. "Hours. Maybe a day. We'll see the fire in the sky when they enter the atmosphere."
Lexa stared at Clarke for a long, agonizing moment. The political landscape of the entire region had just fractured. The arrival of the Ark meant a massive strain on resources, a brutal culture clash, and a volatile shift in power.
"Anya," Lexa said, never taking her eyes off Clarke.
"Heda," Anya responded immediately.
"Send riders to the eastern villages. Tell them to evacuate immediately and move west," Lexa ordered, her voice ringing with absolute authority. "Indra. Assemble the Vanguard. When the sky falls, we will meet these people at the crash site. We will see what kind of leaders fall from the stars."
"Yes, Commander," Indra said, though she cast a dark, suspicious look at Clarke before turning to shout orders in Trigedasleng.
Lexa waited until her generals had stepped away before stepping closer to Clarke, dropping her voice to a low, private murmur.
"Two thousand people," Lexa whispered, the weight of the crown heavy in her eyes. "Are you truly ready to control them, Clarke? Or will they try to control you?"
"They'll try," Clarke murmured back, a dangerous, confident spark igniting in her blue eyes. "But they don't know Wanheda."
Lexa held her gaze for a long moment. Then, as Anya and Indra disappeared into the bustling camp, the dangerous spark in Clarke's blue eyes suddenly flickered and died.
The heavy, unyielding mantle of Wanheda vanished in a millisecond. Clarke's shoulders slumped, the rigid line of her spine softening. She brought a trembling hand up to rub her temples, the pale skin around her eyes tight with stress. She looked less like a warlord and more like a deeply exhausted, overwhelmed girl.
"What do you think I should do with the kid?" Clarke asked, her voice dropping into a quiet, vulnerable rasp. "She's so scared right now."
Lexa blinked, momentarily thrown by the emotional whiplash. A second ago, Clarke was planning a political war against the adult leaders of her own people. Now, her only concern was a traumatized child.
Lexa stepped a fraction closer, instinctively lowering her own guard. "The girl from the valley."
"Madi," Clarke said, her gaze dropping to the dirt. "She lost her parents. She lost her home. And now she's in a strange camp surrounded by warriors with swords, and the sky is literally falling. When I left the tent earlier, she was just staring at the floor, picking at a blanket. I've fought wars, Lexa, but..." Clarke let out a shaky breath. "I don't know how to fix this for her."
Lexa watched Clarke carefully. The fierce, desperate protectiveness Clarke harbored for this child was something Lexa respected, but the open helplessness was new. It was a raw, unfiltered trust that Clarke was offering her.
"You cannot fix the loss, Clarke," Lexa said quietly, her voice a steady, grounding rumble amidst the noise of the camp. "When the scouts took me from my village to the capital to begin my training, I was barely older than her. I was surrounded by strangers. I cried for my mother for three days."
Clarke looked up, her heart aching at the sudden, vivid image of a tiny, terrified Lexa being ripped from her family. "What stopped you from crying?"
"Titus, the Flamekeeper," Lexa replied, a dark shadow crossing her green eyes. "He told me that my tears would not bring my family back, and that fear was a weakness I could no longer afford if I wanted to survive. It was a brutal lesson."
Lexa paused. She looked at Clarke's bruised throat, and her expression softened into something incredibly gentle.
"But the child is not a novice, Clarke. She does not need a brutal lesson. She needs an anchor."
Clarke swallowed hard. "I'm trying to be."
"You already are," Lexa assured her. "Do not try to make her brave. Let her be afraid. But give her a task. Something small to bind her to the present moment. A frightened mind spins wildly into the past and the future. You must force her hands to work in the now. It is the only way to stop the panic."
Clarke absorbed the advice, the tight, suffocating knot in her chest easing slightly. It was practical, grounded wisdom from someone who understood trauma intimately. It was exactly what she needed to hear.
"A task," Clarke repeated softly. She looked at Lexa, a profound gratitude shining in her exhausted eyes. "Thank you."
Lexa gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. "The stars will not hit the earth for hours," she said, looking toward the medical tent. "Go to her. I will ensure the vanguard keeps the perimeter silent so she can rest."
Clarke hesitated for a fraction of a second. She didn't want to walk back to that tent alone. She didn't want to sit in the quiet and face the ghosts in her head without the grounding presence of the Commander standing beside her.
"Come with me," Clarke said, before she could stop herself.
Lexa froze.
"Just... for a minute," Clarke added quickly, her voice slipping into a quiet plea. "She saw you this morning. She knows you're in charge here. If she sees that you aren't angry, that you aren't a threat... maybe she'll feel safer in the camp."
It was a strategic excuse, and they both knew it. Clarke just wanted Lexa there.
Lexa looked at the Sky Girl. The iron rules of the Commander screamed at her to return to her map table, to prepare for the massive invasion from the stars, to distance herself from this impossible, gravity-altering girl before she lost her grip entirely.
But Lexa looked into Clarke's ancient, pleading blue eyes, and found that she couldn't say no.
Lexa gave a slow, measured nod. "Lead the way."
The walk back to the medical tent was a gauntlet of staring eyes.
Warriors and Sky People alike stopped what they were doing to watch them pass. The Commander of the Twelve Clans and the golden-haired girl from the sky, walking side by side through the frosted dirt. They moved in perfect, synchronized step, commanding the space around them so absolutely that the crowds parted long before they even approached.
Neither of them spoke. The silence between them was no longer the heavy, measuring quiet of two rival leaders. It was a charged, crackling stillness.
A sudden, sharp gust of wind swept through the quarry. It caught Clarke's unwashed, tangled blonde hair, blowing a heavy strand across her face. Without thinking, Clarke reached up, her fingers brushing her temple as she tucked the hair behind her ear.
Beside her, Lexa's breath hitched. It was a microscopic sound, completely lost to the wind, but Clarke heard it.
Lexa's green eyes were fixed dead ahead, her posture perfectly rigid, but her gaze had darted for a fraction of a second to the exact spot on Clarke's temple. Lexa's gloved fingers twitched. She swallowed hard, her jaw locking as she forced her hand to curl into a tight, white-knuckled fist at her side, desperately trying to crush the urge to reach out.
Clarke felt the sudden shift in the air. She didn't say a word. Instead, she let her arm swing naturally as they walked, closing the agonizing gap between them. As they took another step, the back of Clarke's bare knuckles briefly, deliberately, brushed against the cold leather of Lexa's gauntlet.
It was a fleeting contact. Gone in a millisecond.
But Lexa's fist instantly uncurled. The rigid tension bled out of her shoulders as the subtle, grounding touch anchored her. She didn't look at Clarke, but the faintest, almost imperceptible softening touched the corner of her mouth.
They reached the medical tent. Lincoln was standing guard outside, his massive arms crossed over his chest, his spear resting against the canvas. When he saw Lexa approaching, he immediately stood at attention, bowing his head respectfully.
Lexa stopped, her green eyes narrowing as she looked at the Trikru warrior.
"Lincoln kom Trikru," Lexa said, her voice carrying the sharp, demanding edge of the Commander. "Your place is with the vanguard. Why are you standing guard at a Sky tent?"
Lincoln kept his head bowed, but his voice was steady. "Wanheda fought beside us and cured Rivo when our own healers could not. I owe her a life debt. I stand guard over what is hers until she releases me."
Lexa gave a single, accepting nod, recognizing the honor in his choice. "Stand your post, Lincoln."
"She is awake," Lincoln murmured, shifting his gaze to Clarke. "But she is terrified. She does not understand the noises."
Clarke let out a slow exhale. "Thank you, Lincoln." She looked at Lexa, offering a quiet nod. "Ready?"
"After you," Lexa replied.
Clarke pushed the heavy canvas flaps aside, and the two of them stepped into the dim, herb-scented warmth of the tent.
Madi was sitting in the exact center of the cot, her knees pulled tightly to her chest, the heavy wool blanket wrapped around her small shoulders like a shield. Her dark, tangled hair hid her face, but the slight tremor in her small frame was visible.
When she heard the footsteps, Madi flinched, curling into an even tighter ball.
Clarke dropped to her knees in the dirt right beside the cot. "Hey, little one," Clarke whispered in flawless, gentle Trigedasleng. "It's just me. I'm right here."
Madi slowly lifted her head. Her dark eyes were red-rimmed and wide with terror. She looked past Clarke, her gaze locking instantly onto the tall, imposing figure of the Commander. Madi's breath hitched, shrinking back against the wooden frame of the cot. Even a child from an isolated valley knew what the red cape and black war paint meant.
Lexa stood perfectly still. She didn't step forward. She simply kept her hands visible and relaxed at her sides, projecting absolute, quiet safety.
"Madi," Clarke said, keeping the conversation entirely in the Grounder tongue. She reached out, resting her hand palm-up on the blanket. "Do you remember Lexa? We're safe here because of her."
Madi looked at Clarke's open hand, then back at Lexa.
"I remember," Madi whispered, her voice a tiny, raspy squeak.
Lexa slowly inclined her head, a gesture of profound respect offered to a child. "You are under my protection, little one," Lexa said, her native tongue rumbling with a soothing, heavy certainty. "No warrior in this camp will raise a hand to you. That is my vow."
Madi stared at the Commander. The words carried the absolute weight of the law. Slowly, the violent trembling in Madi's shoulders began to ease. She uncurled her legs just a fraction, reaching out to place her small, dirty hand into Clarke's palm.
Clarke squeezed her fingers gently. Give her a task.
"Madi," Clarke continued in Trigedasleng, reaching into her jacket pocket. She pulled out a small piece of charcoal and a scrap of stretched rabbit parchment and placed them on the cot. "I have to go outside later to meet some people from the sky. And I really need a map of this tent so I don't get lost when I come back. Do you think you could draw one for me?"
Madi looked at the charcoal. For a child who had spent her life hiding in a cellar, drawing was a luxury, a piece of magic she rarely got to touch.
"A map?" Madi asked, blinking her dark eyes.
"A very detailed one," Clarke nodded seriously. "You have to draw the cot, and the crates, and where the bowls are. It's a very important job. Can you do that for me?"
Madi hesitated. She looked at the charcoal, then at Clarke, and finally at Lexa, who was watching her with quiet, encouraging patience.
Slowly, Madi's small hand reached out. She picked up the charcoal. Her fingers gripped it tightly.
"Sha," Madi whispered.
She turned her attention to the parchment, her dark eyes narrowing in concentration as she made the first, hesitant mark. The frantic, terrified energy in the room instantly dissipated, replaced by the quiet, grounding scratch of charcoal against leather.
Clarke let out a slow, silent breath. She closed her eyes for exactly one second, letting the quiet scratch of charcoal and the smell of tallow wax and the warmth of Lexa's shoulder against hers be the only things that existed. Then she opened them.
She slowly pushed herself up from the dirt floor and moved with a quiet, deliberate motion to Lexa's side, stopping only when there was no space left between them, letting her shoulder press gently against Lexa's.
It was a simple, grounding touch. A silent anchor in the middle of the storm.
Lexa didn't flinch. She didn't pull away. For the first time since she had put on the red cape, the Commander of the Twelve Clans let out a slow, steady breath and leaned — just a fraction of an inch — into the solid warmth of the girl beside her.
They stood together in the quiet and watched the child draw.
Madi's charcoal moved carefully across the parchment. She drew the cot in precise, serious strokes. She drew the crates. She drew the basin in the corner, and the candle on the shelf, and the heavy flap of the tent door. Her small brow was furrowed in concentration, her fear temporarily displaced by the deep, anchoring satisfaction of a task that mattered.
Clarke watched her daughter's hands and felt the particular, devastating tenderness of someone who has lost a thing and found it again and is terrified to breathe too loudly in case it disappears.
Outside, beyond the canvas walls, the camp moved and breathed and sharpened its blades. Anya was composing her suspicions into a careful file. Bellamy was securing a perimeter. Raven was bent over sparking copper, rebuilding the world one wire at a time. And somewhere above the iron-grey clouds, the Ark was dying.
It was all still out there — the politics, the war, the weight of a rewritten future pressing down on Clarke's shoulders like a physical thing. In a day, maybe two, the sky would burn. Jaha would step out of the wreckage and look at her like she was still a girl who needed protecting, and Clarke would have to dismantle that belief so efficiently and so completely that he never tried to rebuild it.
But that was tomorrow.
Right now, there was only this: a warm tent, a child drawing a map of the world she could reach, and the Commander of the Twelve Clans breathing quietly beside her, their shoulders touching, the iron box cracked open just wide enough to let the warmth in.
Clarke let herself have it. Just for a little while.
Madi did not fall asleep easily. Trauma rarely allows for peaceful rest.
Even as her map grew more detailed, her small hands trembled every time a sentry shouted outside or a piece of heavy equipment was dropped in the quarry. Her eyelids drooped with absolute exhaustion, but she fought it, jerking awake with wide, panicked eyes at every sudden noise, terrified that if she closed them, the safety of the tent would vanish.
Clarke didn't rush her. She sat carefully on the edge of the cot, speaking in low, soothing murmurs in Trigedasleng, grounding the child in the present. When Madi finally dropped the charcoal, her small chest heaving with a suppressed sob of pure exhaustion, Clarke gently pulled the wool blanket over her shoulders. She slipped her hand under the blanket, letting Madi's small, dirt-stained fingers wrap tightly around her own.
It took another twenty minutes of Clarke slowly stroking the girl's hair, keeping her own breathing deep and exaggeratedly steady, before the child's frantic grip finally loosened. Madi's breathing leveled out into the uneven, twitchy rhythm of a deeply exhausted sleep.
Clarke didn't dare pull her hand away. She straightened up slowly, careful not to shift the cot, and neither she nor Lexa moved.
The candle on the shelf burned low. Outside, the camp had settled into its nighttime rhythm — the distant call of sentries, the muffled creak of the gate, the occasional burst of low Trigedasleng from the fire pits. In here there was only the child's slow breathing and the warmth and the silence.
Clarke's shoulder was still against hers.
Lexa should leave.
She was aware of this with complete clarity. She had dispatched her riders, doubled the watch, sent word to Polis. Her map table was covered in unfinished assessments. The Coalition's response to the Ark's descent required precise, careful management that could not be delegated, and the Commander of the Twelve Clans was standing in a Sky tent watching a child sleep instead of doing any of it.
She should leave. The logic was irrefutable.
She didn't move.
Five more minutes, Lexa told herself, with the calm rationality of a general making a tactical decision. The child may wake. If she wakes and finds only strangers, the distress will cause noise, and noise will compromise the security of the perimeter. It is strategically sound to remain until the sleep is confirmed as stable.
This was a reasonable assessment. This was entirely about the perimeter.
Clarke exhaled slowly beside her, the tension of the day bleeding out of her shoulders in increments. The bruises on her throat had darkened. The skin beneath her eyes was pale with exhaustion. She had, in the space of a single morning, killed a man, outmaneuvered a queen, contacted a dying ship, and managed the political fallout of two thousand people falling from the sky — and she was standing here now with her shoulder pressed against Lexa's, watching a child sleep, as if this were the only place she had ever intended to end up.
Lexa looked away. She fixed her gaze on the tent wall.
She was fine. She was the Commander. She had sat with dying generals and never flinched, had walked through burning villages and felt nothing but the cold calculation of what needed to be done. She was not affected by the proximity of a girl she had known for five days. That was not a thing that was happening.
Lexa did not engage with this.
She counted the stitches in the tent wall instead. There were many. It was a well-constructed tent.
Clarke shifted her weight slightly, and the movement pressed their shoulders together more firmly for just a moment before settling. Lexa's jaw tightened. The stitches blurred slightly.
The rational explanation, Lexa reasoned, was proximity and circumstance. She had been isolated for a long time. The Commander's life was one of deliberate distance — from her generals, from her people, from anyone who might become leverage in an enemy's hands. Costia had taught her the cost of that distance failing. So the isolation was correct and necessary, and if, occasionally, the weight of it pressed down on the chest like a stone, that was simply the price of the crown.
What she was experiencing now was not attachment. It was the natural human response to an extended period of isolation followed by the sudden, disorienting presence of someone who was — and Lexa acknowledged this with the precise, impersonal tone of a tactician assessing an asset — exceptionally compelling.
Clarke Griffin was compelling. This was an objective fact. She was also dangerous, unpredictable, operating on a knowledge base that Lexa did not yet fully understand, and almost certainly keeping secrets that would rearrange the political landscape if they ever came to light. She was a blade without a hilt, as Indra would say.
These were excellent reasons to maintain distance.
Lexa was maintaining excellent distance. She was standing very close, yes, but that was because the tent was small. And because of the perimeter.
Madi made a small sound in her sleep — not distress, just the soft, involuntary noise of a child dreaming — and Clarke's hand moved before the sound had even finished, reaching out to brush the hair from the girl's face with a touch so automatic, so completely unconscious, that it clearly came from somewhere deeper than thought.
Lexa watched Clarke's hand.
She thought about the first moment she had seen Clarke — not the tactical assessment, not the calculation of the alliance, but the actual first moment. Clarke walking into the command tent in TonDC, surrounded by a hundred armed warriors, and looking straight past Anya on the throne to find the servant girl in the corner. The way Clarke's eyes had found hers across the room with a recognition so immediate and so certain that Lexa had felt it like a physical strike. And then Clarke had taken the water cup from her hands, their fingers brushing, and had looked at her — at Nyla, the servant, the disguise — and whispered thank you with the warmth of someone greeting a person they had been waiting a very long time to find.
In five days. Six, if Lexa counted the ones she had spent pretending to be someone else — which she did not, because counting those days would mean acknowledging that she had been affected before Clarke even knew her real name, and that was a thought she was not prepared to examine.
It was absurd. It was completely, structurally absurd. Lexa had known Costia for three years before she had allowed herself to feel anything, and even then it had happened slowly, carefully, with the full weight of her caution applied to every step. She was not a person who fell quickly. She was not a person who fell at all, not anymore, not since the head in the box, not since she had understood viscerally and permanently what attachment cost.
So what she was feeling was not that.
It was respect. It was tactical admiration. It was the Commander's appreciation for a genuinely exceptional operative who had, in the space of four days, solved three problems that should have taken weeks. That was all this was.
Clarke's shoulder was warm against hers.
Lexa thought about the walk across the quarry. The gust of wind. Clarke's fingers brushing her own temple. The way Lexa's hand had moved toward her entirely without permission before she had caught it and locked it into a fist at her side — and Clarke had felt the shift, somehow, without looking, and had let her knuckles brush Lexa's gauntlet so briefly and so naturally that no one watching would have seen it as anything other than an accident.
It had not been an accident.
Lexa knew it had not been an accident because she had replayed it six times in the last hour and she knew exactly how deliberately Clarke's arm had swung, and she hated that she knew that, and she hated that she had counted six times, and she was in complete and total control of herself.
She looked back at Madi.
The child's face in sleep was very young. The terror of the morning had smoothed out of it entirely, leaving only the particular, temporary peace of someone who had, against all odds, found somewhere safe enough to let their guard down. It was a face that trusted the room it was sleeping in.
Something moved in Lexa's chest.
She identified it clinically: an empathic response to a vulnerable child in a high-stress environment. That was the correct name for it. It was not — it was absolutely not — the specific, devastating tenderness of standing in a warm tent with someone she had known for four days and thinking, with a clarity that bypassed every fortification she had ever built, I would not mind if this were my life.
Lexa did not think that.
She had not thought that.
The candle flickered. Clarke breathed. Madi slept.
Two more minutes, Lexa told herself. For the perimeter.
She stayed.
The fire had burned down to embers by the time Octavia found him.
Lincoln was sitting on the outer edge of the quarry wall, his back to the camp, facing the dark tree line. He wasn't on patrol. He wasn't guarding anything. He was just sitting with his elbows on his knees and his eyes on the forest, very still in the way that only people who have spent a long time alone know how to be still.
Octavia climbed up beside him without asking permission. She pulled her knees to her chest and looked at the same tree line he was looking at.
For a while neither of them said anything. The camp noise was a low murmur behind them — Sky People who couldn't sleep, Trikru sentries changing shifts, the distant crackle of a fire pit. In front of them the forest was black and absolute.
"You couldn't sleep either," Octavia said. It wasn't a question.
"I rarely sleep before a significant event," Lincoln replied. His voice was quiet, the deep unhurried rumble she had come to recognize as his real voice — not the warrior's voice he used around the vanguard, but the one he saved for small conversations in the dark. "It is a habit from my training. You sleep after. Not before."
Octavia turned that over. "That's either very smart or very exhausting."
"Both," Lincoln said, and the corner of his mouth moved.
She looked back at the trees. The knife he had given her was at her hip, a small familiar weight she had already stopped noticing the way you stop noticing your own heartbeat. She had practiced the grip he showed her every day since he gave it to her, alone in the early mornings before the camp woke, moving through the forms slowly and then faster until her hand knew where to go without her telling it.
"Tomorrow," she said. "Or the day after. The sky is going to fall."
"Yes."
"Two thousand people." She said the number like she was trying to understand the shape of it. "I grew up with exactly forty-three people in our section of the Ark. Forty-three. I knew every single one of their voices through the walls." She paused. "Two thousand."
Lincoln was quiet for a moment. "It will change everything," he said simply. Not as a warning. Just as a fact, the way he stated most things — without drama, without softening.
"I know." Octavia picked at the edge of her boot. "That's what I can't sleep about." She hesitated, and then said the real thing, the thing she had been carrying all day without a place to put it. "They're going to look at me like I'm strange. My own people. They've been up there their whole lives and I've been down here learning to throw a knife. They're going to think I've gone Grounder."
Lincoln turned his head to look at her. "Have you?" he asked. There was no judgment in it. He genuinely wanted to know.
Octavia thought about it seriously, the way he always made her think about things seriously by asking questions as though the answers mattered. "No," she said finally. "I don't think so. I think I'm just — me. For the first time." She looked at her hands. "On the Ark I wasn't anything. I wasn't supposed to exist. Down here I'm someone who exists. Someone who can fight and learn and—" she stopped, frustrated with the inadequacy of the words.
"Someone who can choose," Lincoln said quietly.
Octavia looked at him. "Yeah," she said. "That."
He held her gaze for a moment, and then looked back at the trees. "My people will also question me," he said. "A Trikru warrior who guards the Sky tent. Who sits on the wall at night talking to a Sky girl instead of sleeping."
Octavia felt heat rise to her face and was very grateful for the darkness. "Is that a problem? For you?"
Lincoln was quiet long enough that she started to regret asking. Then he said: "The things that are worth doing are usually the things that are difficult to explain."
Octavia stared at the side of his face. The firelight from the camp caught the line of his jaw, the quiet steadiness of his expression. She had spent sixteen years under the floor watching people through cracks and had learned to read them the way other people read words on a page, and what she read in Lincoln's face right now was someone telling the truth without any performance around it.
She looked back at the forest before he could catch her staring.
"When they land," she said, her voice carefully neutral, "Bellamy is going to want to pull me back. Back into Sky People territory, back under his eye, back to being his little sister." She paused. "He's going to be scared of what I'm becoming."
"And what are you becoming?"
She thought about Clarke's voice saying I see you, O. She thought about the knife at her hip and the grip Lincoln had shown her and the way the ground felt under her boots, solid and permanent and hers.
"I don't know yet," she said honestly. "But I want to find out."
Lincoln nodded slowly, as though this were the correct answer to an important question.
They sat together on the wall in the dark, the forest in front of them and the camp behind them, belonging completely to neither and somehow at home in the space between.
The command tent was very quiet.
Lexa had returned to it an hour ago. She had walked back across the quarry with her spine straight and her cape settled and her expression locked into the precise, impenetrable blankness of the Commander, and she had sat down at her map table, and she had looked at the maps.
She was still looking at them.
The candles had burned a third of the way down. The maps had not changed. The Coalition borders were exactly where they had been before she walked into the Sky tent. The Azgeda territory to the north was exactly as hostile. The coordinates Raven had transmitted for the Ark's landing site were marked in fresh ink on the eastern clearing.
None of this required her continued staring. She had already processed all of it hours ago with the efficient, mechanical speed that the Commander's training had made automatic. The tactical picture was clear. The response plan was solid. There was nothing left to analyze.
Lexa stared at the maps anyway.
The iron box, she noticed distantly, had a crack in it.
She had first built it after Costia. Titus had helped her, though he would not have called it that — he would have called it the Commander's discipline, the necessary severance of personal attachment from political function. A leader who could be moved was a leader who could be manipulated. To feel was to be vulnerable. To be vulnerable was to be dangerous to the people depending on you.
Lexa had understood. She had built the box carefully, brick by brick, over the long months after Costia's death, and she had put everything that hurt inside it — the grief, the guilt, the particular devastating memory of Costia's laugh — and she had locked it, and she had become the Commander in full, and it had worked.
The box had a crack in it now.
She was aware of exactly when it had started. Not tonight. Not even in the tent with the child drawing her map. Earlier than that — in TonDC, at a water trough, when a prisoner had sat down beside her in the dirt and started washing dishes and made a joke about Indra's posture with the easy, affectionate confidence of someone who had known her for years instead of hours.
The crack had been small then. A hairline fracture. Easily ignored.
It was less small now.
Lexa pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes. She catalogued, methodically, everything she knew about Clarke Griffin. Sky girl. Daughter of the Chief Medical Officer. Age approximately seventeen. Arrived on the ground eleven days ago. Within those eleven days: established alliances, cured a Reaper, survived an assassination attempt, killed a spy with a stolen arrow, redirected two thousand people from a dying ship, and managed the political fallout of all of it without raising her voice once.
Seventeen years old.
When they put the Flame in her neck. She remembered that year as the worst and most necessary year of her life — the year she became something other than a person, the year she learned that the crown was not a gift but a weight, and that wearing it meant putting down everything else you were carrying first.
Clarke Griffin wore no crown. She had not been trained since childhood to carry impossible things.
And yet.
Lexa opened her eyes and looked at the maps.
The Ark was coming. Two thousand people falling from the sky toward a clearing marked in fresh ink, because a seventeen-year-old girl from space had calculated the trajectory and made the call and been right. In a day, perhaps two, the political landscape of the entire region would fracture and reform around the impact point, and Lexa would have to manage the fallout with the precision of a surgeon and the authority of a warlord.
She should sleep. She should review the vanguard rotation. She should write to the Polis ambassadors with updated intelligence on the Azgeda situation.
Instead she was sitting at her map table thinking about the particular warmth of a shoulder pressed against hers in the dark, and the way Clarke had looked at her over the head of a sleeping child, and the absolute, terrifying clarity of a thought she was not prepared to think.
Lexa picked up her quill. She dipped it in the ink. She held it over the parchment.
She put it down.
The candle burned. The maps waited. Outside, the camp was almost entirely silent now, the sentries moving in their quiet rotations, the fires reduced to coals.
Somewhere across the quarry, in a small medical tent, Clarke Griffin was probably asleep.
Lexa did not think about this.
She thought about it anyway.
The iron box had a crack in it, and no amount of staring at maps was going to fix that tonight.
The Trikru camp was quieter now.
From her position forty feet up in the old oak, Echo had watched the chaos of the morning execution settle slowly back into the ordered hum of a wartime camp. She had watched the Sky Girl emerge from the medical tent and move through the quarry with the terrifying calm of someone who had already calculated every possible outcome and found them all manageable.
Echo had watched, and she had been still, and she had composed her report for Queen Nia in her head with the patient, methodical precision of a spy who had been trained since childhood to see the truth beneath the surface of things.
The arrow was not Azgeda, the report began, in the careful internal language she always used. The trajectory was wrong. The angle too steep. The weapon was real, but the hand that fired it was not ours.
She had spent hours turning the execution over in her mind, reconstructing the angles, accounting for the wind off the river, mapping the sightlines of every Trikru sentry. The math was inexorable. There had been no Azgeda ghost on that northern ridge. The arrow had come from inside the walls.
And the only person inside those walls with both the weapon and the motive was the golden-haired girl from the sky.
The Sky Commander is more dangerous than Nia anticipated, the report continued. She is not a diplomat with weapons. She is a strategist who understands the Coalition's pressure points as well as we do. She used our own trap against us. She turned our best political weapon into a political shield for Lexa and aimed the blame directly at the Ice Nation. Echo paused in her internal composition, the admiration she felt cold and entirely professional. She is the most significant variable in the current landscape. Nia must adjust.
The wind shifted. A branch groaned somewhere to her left.
Echo stilled completely, the way she had been trained — not a tightening, not a flinch, but a total cessation of movement so absolute that her body became part of the tree. Her breathing went shallow. Her eyes moved without her head moving, scanning the dark spaces between the trunks.
Nothing. A branch. The wind.
She turned back to the camp and continued her report.
I will remain on station for one more rotation and then begin the return journey north. Nia should know that the Ark is descending. The Sky Commander has directed her people toward the eastern clearing. Two thousand bodies. I will attempt to determine the projected landing window before I depart.
She shifted her weight silently, redistributing her balance on the branch, preparing to hold position for another three hours. Her fingers tightened on the bark out of habit — the small, grounding anchor of a spy who had spent more of her life in trees than on the ground.
She never heard them.
There was no footstep, no cracking twig, no displaced breath. The Mountain Men had had a hundred years to perfect the art of moving through this forest, and they were, in this single terrible regard, better at it than Echo.
The dart hit her in the side of the neck.
It was a small thing. Smaller than an arrow. Smaller than a blade. It felt like nothing — a faint sting, the sensation of something sharp, and then a spreading warmth that moved through her bloodstream with a speed that was completely, horrifyingly wrong.
Echo's hand shot out.
Her fingers found the branch. They locked around it — the warrior's reflex, the body's absolute refusal to fall — even as the warmth reached her eyes and the dark shapes of the trees began to blur and tilt and merge into one another.
Poison, her mind recorded, with the cold professionalism of a spy filing a report in the last seconds of consciousness. Fast acting. Dart mechanism. Not Grounder.
She tried to move. Her legs didn't respond.
She tried to speak. Her throat had already closed to words.
Her body was sliding. She could feel it — the slow, inevitable failure of the muscles she had spent fifteen years building, the grip of her fingers weakening increment by increment around the bark of the branch. She was listing sideways, and there was nothing she could do, and Queen Nia's report was unfinished, and the Sky Commander was in that camp below and no one knew, no one knew—
Tell Nia—
Her fingers, even in the final second, didn't let go. They had to be peeled from the bark, one by one, by the gloved hands that caught her before she hit the ground.
She didn't feel it.
Echo of Azgeda was already gone.
She woke up to white.
Not the white of snow, which she knew. Not the white of the winter sky or the pale stones of the northern mountains. This was a different white — flat, total, the white of something built rather than grown. It pressed against her eyes from every surface: ceiling, walls, floor, the harsh, sourceless light overhead that cast no shadows.
Echo's first breath was slow and deliberate. Her second catalogued the room. Her third confirmed what her body was already screaming at her.
She was strapped to a metal table.
The restraints were unlike anything she had ever encountered — not rope, not leather, not iron chain. They were wide bands of a cold, rigid material she had no name for, crossing her wrists, her ankles, her chest, with a pressure that was firm and inescapable but not cruel. Clinical. The restraints of something that wanted her intact.
That was what made her afraid.
A weapon made its captives hurt. Whatever had taken her wanted her whole.
Echo turned her head with extreme care, making the movement small enough that the ache in her neck — the site of the dart — didn't flare too badly. She catalogued what she could see. A room. White. A low ceiling. Two lights. A door with no visible handle on her side. A tray on a low table beside her that held instruments she didn't recognize, arranged with the quiet precision of things that were used regularly and cleaned carefully.
She had been trained for capture. She had been trained to give nothing — no name, no clan, no mission, nothing. She had been trained to wait, to watch, to find the weakness in every room and every guard and every routine. She had been trained for Grounder captors, for Trikru interrogation techniques, for the brutal pragmatism of Coalition justice.
She had not been trained for white rooms and restraints she couldn't break and instruments that had no Grounder equivalent.
The door opened.
The person who entered was wearing a white coat. He was A man in his thirties — with the careful, considered energy of a man who spent his time thinking rather than fighting. His eyes, when they settled on Echo, were not cruel. They were interested.
That was worse than cruel.
"You're awake," he said, in the language of the Sky People. His voice was calm. "Good. I was concerned the dosage had been too high for your body weight."
Echo said nothing. She looked at the ceiling. She found the seam where two panels met and fixed her gaze on it with absolute, deliberate blankness.
"My name is Cage Wallace," the man continued, moving to the tray of instruments with unhurried ease. "You are in Mount Weather. You are not in danger of dying today." He paused. "I imagine that is cold comfort, given the circumstances. But it is true."
Echo found the seam. She held it. She breathed.
Give nothing. Take everything. Find the weakness. Wait.
She had been trained for this.
But as Cage Wallace lifted the first instrument from the tray — something thin and hollow, something designed to enter a vein — and turned to her with that terrible, interested calm, Echo of Azgeda felt, for the first time since she was a child standing in the cold outside Nia's fortress, genuinely, completely afraid.
She did not show it. She had been trained for that too.
She found the seam on the ceiling, and she held it, and she waited.
In the white mountain, the harvest continued.
In the grey forest, no report reached the Ice Queen.
Above the clouds, the Ark burned on.