The trek back to the crash site to strip the remaining transponder parts from Raven's pod was grueling work. The heavy metal components were awkward to carry, and the humid forest air was thick with tension.
For the first mile back toward the camp, Raven had been uncharacteristically quiet. She trudged alongside Clarke, her grip white-knuckled around a bundle of wiring. Connor's toxic words in the dropship had taken root, poisoning her thoughts until she couldn't stand the silence anymore.
Raven abruptly stopped walking. She turned to Clarke, her dark eyes entirely stripped of their usual bravado.
"Did something happen between you and Finn?" Raven asked, her voice tight and direct.
Clarke halted, nearly dropping the heavy metal panel she was carrying. She looked at Raven, her expression softening with genuine sympathy. "No. Nothing happened."
Before Raven could let out a breath of relief, Octavia shifted the strap of her rifle and chimed in, her tone blunt but entirely protective of her friend. "Well, it definitely didn't happen from Clarke's side, anyway."
Raven's stomach dropped. She looked back and forth between them. "What do you mean?"
Aleksander, who had been leading the vanguard with Bellamy, stopped and turned around. He looked at Raven, his empathy picking up the sharp, agonizing twist of heartbreak radiating from her. He respected Raven's intellect too much to let her live in a delusion.
"She means," Aleksander interjected calmly, stepping into the conversation to spare Clarke the awkwardness, "that before your pod hit the ground, Finn spent the entire week aggressively pining after Clarke. He shadowed her, he flirted with her at every opportunity, and he actively tried to isolate her. And in all that time, he did not mention—even once—that he had a girlfriend waiting for him on the Ark."
Raven looked like she had just been punched in the chest. Her breathing hitched, and she looked desperately at Clarke, silently begging her to call Aleksander a liar.
Clarke let out a heavy, regretful sigh. She hated being the source of another girl's pain, but she wasn't going to lie. "It's true, Raven. I'm so sorry."
Raven swallowed hard, staring down at the dirt. She didn't cry, but her entire posture crumbled. The boy she had literally risked the vacuum of space for hadn't even bothered to mourn her.
"Well," Aleksander said quietly, his voice losing its usual sharp edge, replaced by a strangely gentle pragmatism. "It is better that you know this now so you can break away from him. He isn't actually sound of mind, Raven."
That made Bellamy, Clarke, and Octavia immediately exchange sharp looks. They knew exactly how Aleksander knew that—his telepathy—but they all remained completely silent, waiting to see how he was going to explain this to a girl who didn't know about the magic yet.
Raven wiped her nose with the back of her wrist, looking up at him with a mix of hurt and confusion. "What do you mean he's not sound of mind? He's just... a jerk who cheated on me."
"It goes much deeper than that," Aleksander explained smoothly, leaning against a moss-covered tree. "I studied psychology extensively on the Ark, Raven. I know how to read behavioral patterns, and the red flags Finn is displaying are massive."
Bellamy smirked just slightly, impressed by Aleksander's flawless, mundane cover story.
"Like what?" Raven asked, her mechanical brain latching onto the logic to shield herself from the emotional pain.
"He possesses a dangerous level of impulsivity," Aleksander explained, his tone clinical but sympathetic. "While the dropship was falling, he unbuckled his harness for a joyride and convinced two other boys to do the same. When the parachute deployed, those two boys were slammed against the wall and killed instantly. And Finn? He brushed past the guilt almost immediately. People who feel no remorse for getting others killed are lethal to be around."
Raven's eyes widened in horror. She hadn't known about the boys on the dropship.
"Beyond that, he has a deeply toxic case of codependency," Aleksander continued gently. "He doesn't actually want to be a hero; he is terrified of being alone. He cannot function without a female anchor to validate him. The second he thought you were gone, he didn't take time to grieve. He simply panicked and immediately tried to attach himself to Clarke. He replaced you, not out of malice, but because he is psychologically parasitic."
Raven stared at him, the heavy, undeniable truth of his words sinking in. It made sickeningly perfect sense. Taking the fall for her spacewalk. Clinging to Clarke. His constant need to insert himself into the middle of conflicts just to be seen as the 'good guy.'
"He's a liability, Raven," Aleksander finished, offering her a look of profound, grounded respect. "You are brilliant. You built a pod out of scrap metal and crossed a radioactive atmosphere just to get here. You do not need to drag an emotional anchor who doesn't even have the loyalty to remember your name."
Clarke stepped forward and gently put a hand on Raven's shoulder. "He's right. You deserve better than what Finn's offering."
Raven took a slow, shuddering breath. The heartbreak was still there, heavy and suffocating, but the confusion was gone, replaced by a cold, hard clarity. She tightened her grip on the wiring in her hands and gave Aleksander a firm, grateful nod.
"Okay," Raven whispered, straightening her spine. "Okay. Let's get these parts back to camp."
The Disturbance
The group had made good time navigating the dense forest, burdened by the heavy crates of transponder parts and salvaged rifles, but the mood was lighter. They finally had a fighting chance.
Suddenly, Aleksander stopped dead in his tracks.
His Fey senses flared violently, like a cold needle scraping against the base of his skull. The ambient hum of the forest had shifted, replaced by a dark, metallic taste in the air and a distant wave of absolute, primal terror.
"Stop," Aleksander commanded softly, his voice instantly silencing the group. He turned to Bellamy, his eyes darkening. "Take them back to camp. Now."
Clarke frowned, stepping forward. "What? Why? What's out there?"
"Alex, we have guns now," Octavia argued, her grip tightening on her rifle. "If it's Grounders, we can fight."
Aleksander didn't argue. He simply turned his head and said."No, excuses."
The authority that the breath caught in both girls' throats. It was a look that left absolutely zero room for debate.
Bellamy, having seen exactly what Aleksander was capable of when the mask slipped, didn't need to be told twice. He knew the Alpha Station prodigy was a walking weapon of mass destruction with his magic.
"Let's move," Bellamy ordered, grabbing Clarke by the elbow and giving Octavia a shove. "Don't argue with him. Go."
Reluctantly, the group turned and double-timed it back toward the safety of the wooden walls. Aleksander waited until they were out of sight before turning entirely off the path, melting into the shadows and sprinting toward the source of the terror.
Within minutes, the distant sounds of the forest were completely drowned out by the agonizing sounds of slaughter.
Aleksander broke through the heavy underbrush and looked down from a ridge into a small, secluded clearing. Below him was a Grounder hunting village, and it was being violently torn apart.
But it wasn't a rival clan doing the raiding.
Tearing through the village were monsters. They were men, but they were horrifically disfigured. Their faces and bald heads were covered in grotesque, swollen bumps and jagged, unnatural horns. They moved with a savage, twitching, primal energy. They weren't using tactics; they were using raw, cannibalistic brutality, showing absolutely no mercy as they tore into the villagers.
Aleksander's telepathy instantly connected the dots, pulling fragmented lore from the memories of the exiled Grounder he had encountered days ago.
Reapers.
They were the boogeymen of the woods. Grounders who had been captured by the Mountain Men and never seen again, only to return as brainwashed, feral cannibals that the local clans feared above all else.
Down in the mud, a terrified Grounder woman tripped, shielding two young children with her body as three Reapers descended upon them, their jaws snapping wildly.
Aleksander didn't hesitate.
He dropped from the ridge, landing silently in the center of the chaos.
Aleksander threw his hands out, his eyes blazing with a toxic, vibrant green light. Wispy, crackling emerald energy erupted from his palms. With a massive exertion of telekinetic force, he hit the three Reapers like a freight train. The monsters were violently lifted into the air and hurled backward across the clearing, smashing into the wooden huts with bone-crushing force.
Four more Reapers turned, snarling as they abandoned their prey and charged the newcomer.
Aleksander didn't even flinch. He raised his hands, chanting a swift, lethal incantation. Glowing, whitish darts of pure magical force materialized in the air around him. With a flick of his wrists, he unleashed the Magic Missile spell. The glowing projectiles tore across the clearing, slamming into the charging Reapers with the force of artillery shells and dropping them instantly to the dirt.
The Grounder woman stared at him, completely paralyzed by shock as the glowing green energy faded from his hands. She had never seen magic, only death.
"Stel yuj! Gouthru klir!" (Stay strong! Run to safety!) Aleksander roared at her in flawless Trigedasleng, the native Grounder tongue he had ripped from a dying man's mind.
The sound of her own language snapped the woman out of her trance. She scooped up her children and ran blindly into the safety of the dense woods.
With the immediate threat clear, Aleksander walked over to one of the incapacitated Reapers. He placed a hand over the monster's disfigured, twitching face and forced his telepathy past the feral madness to read its shattered memories.
What he saw made his blood run cold. It was horrifying.
He saw the pristine, sterile white walls of Mount Weather. He felt the agony as captured Grounders were blasted with boiling water and doused with burning, acidic chemical scrubs. He saw them thrown into holding cages like animals, visually inspected by men in white lab coats.
Then came the conditioning. The Cerberus Project.
Phase 1 - Conditioning: The Grounders were securely strapped to heavy metal gurneys. Every two hours, an agonizing, high-pitched tone generator was sounded, accompanied by 15 seconds of brutal electric shocks to the wrists, followed immediately by an injection of a highly addictive synthetic drug known only as The Red.
Phase 2 - The Deathmatch: Once the Grounder was fully conditioned to fear the tone, they were thrown into a concrete pit. Two newly broken subjects were pitted against each other in a fight to the death. The prize for survival was another dose of the Red. The winner officially became a Reaper.
Aleksander pulled his hand back, a deep, sickening wave of disgust washing over him. The Mountain Men weren't just surviving; they were playing god, manufacturing monsters out of these Grounders.
Before Aleksander could process the sheer scale of the atrocity, his combat senses flared.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
High-velocity assault rifle rounds tore out of the tree line, aimed directly at his back.
Aleksander spun around, his green telekinetic magic flaring to life instantly. The bullets froze dead in mid-air, spinning violently against an invisible, kinetic shield just inches from his face.
Stepping out of the brush were six figures. They were dressed in heavy, gray hazmat suits, their faces completely obscured by dark gas masks. They were Mountain Men—the elite guard of Mount Weather—sent to supervise the Reaper harvest.
The guards froze, their rifles lowering slightly as they stared in absolute, uncomprehending shock at the bullets hovering in mid-air.
Aleksander didn't give them a second to recover.
With a sharp, violent thrust of his hands, Aleksander reversed the telekinetic grip. The suspended bullets launched backward with double their original velocity. Five of the hazmat-suited guards were struck instantly, their bodies collapsing into the mud before they even realized what hit them.
The sixth guard was grazed in the shoulder, stumbling backward with a muffled cry. Before the man could raise his weapon again, Aleksander telekinetically ripped the heavy rifle from his hands, throwing it into the trees.
Aleksander closed the distance in a blur. He pressed his glowing palm against the terrified guard's gas mask, whispering a harsh, ancient sleeping spell. The man's eyes rolled back, and he slumped unconscious to the ground.
Aleksander immediately dove into the sleeping guard's mind. The memories confirmed everything he had just seen in the Reaper, adding layers of arrogance, xenophobia, and a desperate reliance on Grounder blood to survive radiation.
The political reality of the board became instantly clear to Aleksander.
Making a treaty with the Grounders? That was a distinct tactical possibility. They were warriors protecting their land.
Making a treaty with the Mountain Men? Impossible. They were parasites hiding behind technology, viewing everyone on the surface as cattle. They were an enemy that had to be eradicated.
Cleaning the Board
Aleksander stepped back, looking at the dead hazmat guards. With a wave of his hand, he conjured a localized wave of intense magical fire, rapidly incinerating the bodies to ensure Mount Weather couldn't run an autopsy on the damage.
He then turned to the incapacitated Reapers on the ground. He knew they couldn't be saved. Their minds had been physically and chemically destroyed by the Cerberus Project; there was no bringing them back to the people they once were.
With a cold, merciful flick of his wrist, invisible telekinetic force snapped their necks, granting them the only peace Mount Weather had left them.
Aleksander walked over to the unconscious Mountain Man. He grabbed the heavy collar of the hazmat suit and effortlessly slung the man over his shoulder. The hundred needed intel, and this prisoner was going to provide exactly what they needed to tear Mount Weather apart.
Aleksander also took the riflles into his expansion pocket and turned his back on the burning clearing and headed back to camp.