Chapter Text

Chapter Three

Clarke

Her eyes fluttered open. Clarke was sitting in a chair. She was strapped into it. She reached for the belt that crossed her chest. 

“Don’t. Stay buckled in.” 

Clarke bolted up to see Wells sitting next to her. She beamed at him. They tried to hug but could only awkwardly get one arm around each other. They were both anchored into chairs on a drop ship.

They were surrounded by a hundred other teenagers across three levels of the escape pod. 

Clarke gasped. “Wells, what’s going on? What are you doing here? Are they going to kill us all?”

“They’re not killing us. They’re sending the prisoners to the ground. The Ark is dying. My father thinks Earth is the only way we can all live.”

“You’re not a prisoner, Wells.”

Wells broke eye contact. “I set the sacred tree on fire.” 

“You what?!”

“I had to get arrested to get on this dropship with you. I saw the launch plans on my dad’s tablet.”

The pod shifted. All the prisoners jolted to the side. They were launching. Their seats rumbled. Clarke’s stomach dropped. She felt like a bullet being ejected from a gun. 

Kids screamed. The engine roared. The wires on the ceiling sparked. The council didn’t even bother putting them in a quality escape pod. 

The screens in the center of the ship buzzed with static. A voice cut in and out of the transmission. The picture came into focus. A dark skinned man peered at the kids from the camera with a stern expression. It was Wells’ father. It was the chancellor.

“Prisoners of The Ark,” the chancellor’s recorded message started, “today you are being sent to Earth to find out if the planet is survivable for us all.” A couple boys booed. “The Ark needs you. We have sent you down with clothes, tents, and radios. You have enough food and water to last a few days. We have given you a map to an underground bunker with enough food for a whole city. Once you have set up a camp, radio in to let us know you are safe, and the rest of your people will join you.”

“Fuck you!” A girl shouted at the tvs. 

The dropship jumped like it hit something. Clarke wasn’t an engineer, but she knew that meant they had hit Earth’s atmosphere. 

She no longer felt like a soccer ball in physical education. She felt completely detached from her body, like she had died in the crash and was now floating back to The Ark. 

Clarke looked down to make sure she still had a body. Her legs were hovering an inch over her chair. Only the straps across her chest kept Clarke from floating to the dome of the rocket. 

The weightlessness made Clarke laugh uncontrollably. She had never so much as floated in water before. 

The joy didn’t last long. Clarke’s forehead slammed into her knees. A panel of the television snapped off the center column and shattered on the grated floor in front of her feet. 

They had landed.

“Clarke, are you okay?” Wells unbuckled and kneeled in front of her.

She touched the throbbing spot on her face. No blood, but there would be a bruise. She tried turning her head from side to side but had to stop before her chin could touch her shoulder. She diagnosed herself with whiplash. It could have been worse.

“I’m fine. Check on the communications and supplies. I’ll see if anyone is injured.”

Wells opened the 3d printed crates behind the seats to inventory what supplies his dad had sent them down with. 

One hundred more seatbelts clicked open. Kids climbed down the thin ladders and landed on the bottom level platform, right in front of the sealed doors. 

A girl on the second floor screamed. Clarke raced up the ladder to see what was wrong. A girl with hair down to her waist was shaking a boy slumped over in his seat. 

Clarke rested two fingers on his neck. He was dead. His neck broke on impact. 

“I’m sorry,” said Clarke. The girl held the boy and wailed. 

Clarke looked around the ship. Two other teenagers were also motionless, only staying in their seats because they didn’t live long enough to unbuckle themselves. 

“Give it back!” A kid by the door yelled. 

Clarke went down the ladder two rungs at a time. 

The bottom level was packed shoulder to shoulder with teenagers all wearing identical gray jumpsuits. 

Wells wasn’t wearing the prison uniform. He had on a white t-shirt and green cargo pants. He must have gotten himself arrested today. 

Wells gripped one sleeve of a black puffer jacket, a guy that was taller than him held the other sleeve. They tugged back and forth, ripping the stitches one thread at a time. 

The guy Clarke’s boyfriend was wrestling with wasn’t in prison clothes either. He was wearing the black soft body armor of a guard. 

Clarke supposed it made sense to send a guard to the ground with the prisoners. He could keep the peace and report conditions to his superiors. 

“Wells!” Clarke shouted. “Let it go!” He did as his girlfriend requested. Five seconds on the ground and he had already picked a fight with the authorities. 

The guard held the jacket up in his fist like a trophy. He threw it on the floor when he could have easily put it back in one of the open crates. 

Some bins had pants and coats and boots, some had pouches of water and apples and carrots. 

“You don’t understand,” Wells pointed a finger at the guard. “He’s not a real guard. His badge says Nguyen and you and I both know that that is not Nguyen.”

Clarke watched the guy in uniform run a hand through his dark hair that had stuck to his forehead from sweat. It was the young man that handcuffed Clarke that morning. Wells was right. Clarke’s gut was right. He was an imposter.

“Who are you?” Clarke stood between the two boys. 

The fake guard scoffed.

“Bellamy?” A voice squeaked from the crowd. A wire thin girl pushed her way past teenagers twice her size. 

The guy impersonating a guard —Bellamy— ran to hug her. She stood on her tiptoes to reach around his neck. “Octavia,” he said, “my little sister.”

Sister? No one on The Ark had a sibling. Giving birth more than once was a capital crime. 

Bellamy let go of his sister. As he moved to the door, kids parted to give him space. Bellamy was the tallest person on the ship, and clearly the oldest. 

His rugged face made Clarke guess Bellamy could be 25. His sister, Octavia, was so small and pale she looked 12. Clarke knew she had to be at least 13 to be in prison though. 

Bellamy grabbed the chains on the wall. “Let’s get this door open.” A few people in the crowd whooped. 

Wells interlocked his hand into Clarke’s as Bellamy yanked the chains. The Earth was full of enough radiation to kill all one hundred of them in seconds. Their blood would boil. Their skin would melt off. The wall that Bellamy was about to break down was the only thing protecting Clarke from death.

A rush of cool air blew Clarke’s hair behind her prison jumpsuit. Some kids stayed back and muttered to each other about being lab rats for The Ark. Clarke and a few other teenagers took small steps towards the blinding sunlight.

”Wait.” Bellamy’s command boomed around the open air lock. He stood at the front of the pack. Little Octavia cowered behind her big brother. Her wide eyes peaked around Bellamy to start exploring the planet. “Octavia,” he said, “we are going to be the first humans to step foot on Earth in over a century.” He held out his weathered hand. Octavia took it.

She watched her shoes follow in Bellamy’s footsteps. The siblings disappeared as silhouettes into the daylight.

“Oh my god.” Octavia gasped. 

Clarke charged out of the ship after them, holding her hand up to block the sun. Bellamy and Octavia were probably choking on their own blood by now. 

Clarke’s skin tingled with an uncomfortable heat. Earth was killing her.

The heat got more and more intense. The dangerous levels of radiation creeped up the bumps on Clarke’s arms.

The planet ahead of them was nothing but blinding white light. Clarke’s heart thumped rapidly in her chest, her throat, her face.

“I love you, Clarke,” said Wells as they took the final step off the metal of the ship.

The ground squished under her slippers. Clarke closed her eyes and took in one last deep breath. It felt… amazing. The air went down her throat like honey. She breathed again. It smelled like the sacred tree on The Ark before Wells burned it, but amplified so intensely it overwhelmed Clarke’s senses. She opened her eyes and couldn’t help but shake her head in disbelief.

Hundreds of trees surrounded them higher than any ceiling and brighter than any paint. The cerulean of the sky, the vermillion of the trees, the umber of the dirt filled her vision.

Clarke and Wells looked at each other, mouths agape with wonder. They were alive and they were free.

They marched further into the woods as more and more people spilled out of the ship. At the front of the pack, Bellamy watched Octavia pick flowers and squat down to sniff the grass. His tiny smile made him look younger.

Wells let go of Clarke’s hand. He studied the scene. “We’ve made it to the ground!” He made his voice echo for meters like how his father learned to do to address crowds as an elected official. “Now we need to survive. We can form one team to make enough shelter for everyone, and one team to ration the food.”

”Who made you chancellor, daddy’s boy?” A guy with greasy shoulder length hair sneered.

”We still have a chancellor.” Clarke pointed to the sky. “We can live by the same laws down here.”

Bellamy forced a laugh. “ We didn’t even live by The Ark’s laws on The Ark, princess. And we don’t have to listen to you-“

“You don’t want anarchy.” Wells took a step towards Bellamy’s chest and lowered his voice a little. Everyone could still hear him, but the words were for one person. 

“That’s exactly what I want.” Bellamy pushed both his hands into Wells’ chest, shoving him back half a step.

Wells pushed back, twice as hard. Bellamy stumbled to the ground. He stood up fast and punched Wells in the jaw.

”Bellamy!” Octavia reached for his elbow to stop him from swinging another punch.

Clarke ran between the boys. Wells rubbed his blackened jaw. She made him sit down to let her inspect his mouth. His gums were bleeding. Clarke was happy he didn’t lose a tooth. It would be too easy to contract an infection out here.

”I’m fine,” he whispered without meeting her eyes.

”We are not The Ark anymore.” Bellamy’s deep voice was naturally louder than Wells when he tried projecting. “We have no rules. We do whatever the hell we want, whenever the hell we want to do it.”

”Hell yeah! Whatever the hell we want!” The greasy kid repeated.

”Whatever the hell we want!” Someone else picked up. More and more people joined the chant as Clarke and Wells san silently on the dirt. “Whatever the hell we want! Whatever the hell we want! Whatever the hell we want!”

Clarke survived landing on Earth in a spaceship, now she needed to survive Bellamy and his army of rebellious teenaged prisoners.