[Dropship Camp — Day 5, Morning]
Murphy had claimed the supply crate nearest to the fire pit — the one with the flattest top surface and the best sightline to both the ration storage and the camp entrance — and was distributing breakfast like a toll collector.
"One bar. Take it and move." Murphy dropped a ration into each outstretched hand. His voice carried the disinterested authority of someone who'd assigned himself a job nobody had asked him to do. "One per person. Don't care if you're hungry. Everyone's hungry."
A kid Cal recognized as Dax reached for a second bar. Murphy slapped his hand away without looking.
"I said one."
"Who put you in charge of food?"
"Nobody. That's why I'm good at it."
Cal watched from the dropship ramp, chewing his own bar — the first of at least three he'd need today — and tracking the dynamics. In the show, Murphy had been accused of Wells's murder by this point in the timeline. The accusation had triggered a near-lynching, then banishment, then a transformation from petty bully into something desperate and violent. The banishment was the inflection point — the moment where the group decided Murphy was disposable, and Murphy decided the group was the enemy.
None of that had happened. Wells was alive. Charlotte hadn't killed anyone. No body meant no accusation, no accusation meant no mob, and John Murphy was still here: camp bully, ration distributor, and a completely unknown variable.
Murphy caught Cal watching. His jaw tightened.
"You want something?"
"Second bar." Cal held up his empty wrapper. "I'll do the perimeter check in exchange."
"Perimeter check is Miller's job."
"Miller's asleep."
Murphy stared at him. The calculation behind his eyes was less hostile than it had been on Day One — more wary, like a dog being approached by someone who hadn't kicked it yet but might. He tossed a ration bar underhand. Cal caught it one-handed.
"You eat more than anyone here," Murphy said. "Someone's going to notice."
"Then I'll work more than anyone here. Problem solved." Cal peeled the wrapper and bit. Sawdust and compressed nutrients, but his body metabolized it so fast the hunger barely dipped. "Come with me on the check if you want. Two sets of eyes."
A beat. Murphy's posture shifted — suspicion giving way to something that didn't have a name yet. Not trust. Not respect. Curiosity, maybe. The disorientation of being included.
"Whatever." Murphy grabbed his own bar and followed Cal toward the tree line.
They walked the perimeter in silence. Cal noted the guard positions — Miller's empty post, two kids Bellamy had assigned to the south approach doing more talking than watching. The tree line pressed close, dense and green, and somewhere inside it people were watching. Cal could feel it in a way that had nothing to do with earthbending — an animal certainty, predator awareness, the sense of eyes tracking movement from concealment.
"You think they're out there," Murphy said. Not a question.
"One of them threw a spear through Jasper's chest from a distance nobody in this camp could match. So yes."
Murphy's hand went to the makeshift blade he'd fashioned from hull plating. Crude, unbalanced, but sharp enough to cut. He scanned the treeline with the kind of focus Cal hadn't expected — not panicked, not theatrical. Watchful.
"Bellamy says we fight. Clarke says we talk. What do you say?"
"I say we survive long enough to figure out which one works."
Murphy snorted. Almost a laugh, stripped of humor. "That's not an answer."
"Best one I've got."
---
The screaming started at midday.
Cal was sorting wire behind the dropship — building cable lengths for the next project, a crude antenna that might boost their radio range — when the sound cut through the camp's ambient noise like glass breaking. High-pitched, ragged, a child's voice stretched past coherence.
He dropped the wire and moved.
Charlotte was on the ground near the fire pit. A camp argument about Jaha's policies — someone had been defending the Council's decisions, someone else had cursed the Chancellor's name, and the word "floated" had landed like a match on gasoline. Charlotte had snapped. She was curled on her side, arms wrapped around her head, fingernails dragging red lines down her own forearms while her mouth produced sounds that weren't words.
Clarke got there first. Medical instinct — she dropped to her knees beside Charlotte and reached for her wrists, pulling her hands away from her skin with the practiced firmness of someone who'd trained for this on the Ark.
"Charlotte. Charlotte, look at me. You're safe. Can you hear me? You're—"
Charlotte's elbow caught Clarke's jaw. Not aimed, just wild, a body in panic striking at contact. Clarke's head snapped sideways. She absorbed the hit, adjusted her grip, and kept talking in the same steady tone.
Cal hung back. His instinct was to intervene — position Charlotte away from the argument, move her somewhere quiet, manage the situation. But Wells was already there.
Wells Jaha — hated, isolated, the Chancellor's son whom everyone in this camp blamed for their parents' deaths — sat down on the dirt three feet from Charlotte and didn't speak.
He didn't touch her. Didn't offer words. Didn't perform comfort for an audience. He sat cross-legged on the ground while Clarke handled the medical response, and he waited. His face was still, patient, and when Charlotte's screaming wound down to heaving sobs and then to silence, Wells was the fixed point she'd been flailing toward.
She turned her head. Looked at him. Red-rimmed eyes, scratched arms, face blotched and swollen.
Wells looked back. Said nothing. Stayed.
Cal watched from twenty feet away and thought: that never happened. In the show, Wells was dead by Day Three. Charlotte had killed the person who would've become her anchor, and then thrown herself off a cliff when the guilt ate through her. Two deaths, linked, pointless, cascading into Murphy's banishment and a chain of consequences that ran all the way to the season finale.
Wells was alive. Charlotte was broken but breathing. The chain had snapped.
He turned away and let them have the moment without an audience.
---
Jasper woke on the afternoon of Day Six.
Cal was outside when it happened — the shout came from inside the dropship, Monty's voice breaking through its usual quiet register into something raw and high.
"He's awake! Clarke — he's awake!"
The camp surged. By the time Cal reached the ramp, a crowd had formed around the dropship entrance, bodies pressing forward to see. Clarke was inside, checking Jasper's pupils with a salvaged penlight, asking him to follow her finger, to state his name, to count backwards from ten.
Jasper made it to seven before his voice cracked. "Where's Monty?"
"Here." Monty's face was wrecked — tears cutting clean lines through three days of dirt. He gripped Jasper's hand and didn't let go. "I'm here, man. You're okay."
"I got speared."
"Yeah."
"That sucks."
Monty laughed. Wet, cracked, the kind of laugh that lived next door to a sob. "Yeah, it really does."
The camp exhaled. Not literally, but the pressure changed — Cal could feel it in the way shoulders dropped, voices softened, aggression bled out of postures that had been coiled since the spear hit. Jasper was alive. Someone had been wounded by the ground itself, and they'd survived. Proof that this wasn't a death sentence. Proof that Clarke's medicine and Cal's antiseptic and Monty's refusal to let go had been enough.
Clarke emerged from the dropship, wiping her hands on her pants. Her eyes found Cal in the crowd.
"The wound's cleaner than it has any right to be," she said. Quiet. Pitched for him alone. "Whatever was in that antiseptic you found — it worked faster than standard hydrogen peroxide should."
"Supply kit stuff. Might've been a concentrated formula."
She held his gaze. The same half-second too long she'd given him after the irrigation. Clarke Griffin, cataloguing data points. Filing them.
Cal broke eye contact and pushed through the crowd toward the tree line. He needed distance and he needed calories — two ration bars in his pocket, stolen during the excitement when nobody was counting — and he needed to stand somewhere alone and process the fact that the timeline was bending under his weight.
---
Late afternoon. The light was beginning its long lean toward evening, shadows stretching east from every tree. Cal sat on the perimeter ridge, finishing the second ration bar, watching the western horizon.
Inside the camp, Jasper was telling Monty about the river crossing in a voice that faded in and out of coherence. Charlotte was asleep near the secondary fire, arms bandaged where she'd scratched them, her head resting against the log where Wells sat reading wristband data. Murphy was arguing with someone about water rationing — his voice carrying clear and combative across the camp.
Normal. Almost normal. A camp of teenagers finding rhythm in a world that wanted to kill them.
Cal let himself sit with that for thirty seconds. The breeze carried the smell of pine and woodsmoke and something floral he still couldn't name. Birds called from the canopy. The sun was warm on his face.
Then the horizon line shifted.
Low. Barely visible. A thread of color that didn't belong — yellow-green, hugging the ground, moving east with the wind. Thin enough to mistake for pollen haze or evening mist. But the color was wrong. Too saturated. Too uniform. And it was advancing.
Cal stood. His hands went cold.
He knew what it was. Mount Weather's acid fog — a chemical weapon deployed through an underground vent system, capable of dissolving organic tissue on contact. In the show, it had killed people in minutes. Skin blistering, lungs filling, a death so ugly the cameras hadn't lingered.
He had maybe ten minutes before it reached camp.
Cal dropped the ration wrapper, turned, and sprinted.
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Your Reviews and Power Stones are the best way to show support. They help me know what you're enjoying and bring in new readers!
You don't have to. Get instant access to more content by supporting me on Patreon. I have three options so you can pick how far ahead you want to be:
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