Anya said not to approach the Sky People, so he doesn't. He just watches from a distance as the young, strange people pour out of the mouth of their ship. Many are his sister's age, but none appear to have a fraction of the discipline Octavia does.

His sister is a warrior, and has been for years.

These people…

These people are children.

Stupid ones, Bellamy notes, as some fall to their knees and kiss the ground perilously close to a pile of deer droppings.

And then, he sees her.

Unlike all the others, she feels familiar to him. He tells himself it is her hair—it's true that it's an unusual color, like a burst of winter sunlight through clouds. But she has it pulled back into a sensible braid, like the one he used to weave his sister's hair into before she earned her warrior braids.

She speaks low words he can't quite hear, looks at a piece of paper held in small, pale hands, and casts her eyes up at the heavens from which she fell before firing off rapid orders. Though a few sneer at her and call her princess, most of the children scramble to do as she commands.

Her face is fierce as she watches them, and Bellamy knows he was wrong.

Those others may be children, but this girl—their princess, it seems—she is a warrior.

He leaves to report back to Anya, and when he returns at dawn, they're gone.

It isn't hard to track them to the Mountain. They are a hundred strong, and new to earth. They don't move carefully.

Bellamy follows the trail, picturing their journey.

They lose three along the way. One of them, a younger boy, to the spiked pit Bellamy used to have to check for wild animals before he began his training to be a warrior. He can see where the Sky People pulled some of wooden spikes out of the pit.

It's a smart move, one that he imagines came as an order from their princess. Even with the makeshift weapons, they lose two more people to the panther's claws and teeth before they wound it enough to kill.

He sneers at the panther corpse, left to rot. It's been too long in the sun for him to take back to TonDC, and would make people sick if they ate it now, but he hates to see the waste.

Bellamy stops when he reaches the river. This is the closest he's ever been to the Mountain, and it's strange, looking up at it. He'd thought he would fear it more. He knows that it holds terrible things.

But it just looks like a mountain.

And now it's swallowed the Sky People whole.

Not long after the hurricane, his sister goes missing.

Her whole patrol does.

Bellamy has never felt rage like this.

Nor despair.

It gets to the point where he can barely sleep. He knows, he knows that the Mountain Men took her, took her like they took his mother when Octavia was barely old enough to walk, like they've taken thousands upon thousands of the earthborn. Like they took the Sky People when the Sky People came too close.

"You're going to get yourself killed," Lincoln tells him when his sister has been missing five days. The exhaustion pulls at Bellamy's limbs like shackles.

But Bellamy barely spares his sister's chosen a glance. The bruised circles under Lincoln's eyes are getting worse with each day that passes, darkening like the coming night.

"Not before you do," he retorts, eyes searching the trees even though dusk is falling, even though those taken have never, ever returned. "Octavia will be angry that you haven't been eating."

He refuses to say would, as if it's not certain she'll come back.

His sister is a miracle, a girl born too soon. The healers had told his mother it would be best to leave the sickly, tiny infant out in forest, let nature take its course. She would never live, and even if she did, she would be weak all her life.

His mother refused, and his sister lived, and she isn't weak. She's a warrior.

She's a warrior.

She'll come back.

She's a warrior.

On the seventh day, his sister limps through the woods into TonDC. She's pale and muddy, dressed in unfamiliar clothes, her hair loose and tangled, and she's being helped along by the princess of the Sky People.

At first, he thinks they're a dream, a hallucination. He still hasn't slept, not for more than an hour or so at a time, and it seems reasonable that his troubled mind would dream up both his sister and the princess returning to him, arms supporting one another as if they're friends.

It wouldn't be the first time he's dreamed of the girl with the pale, bright hair.

But then Octavia sees him.

"Bellamy!"

It's half sob, half shout, all joy.

He makes it to her in the blink of an eye, plucks her out of the sky girl's arms. She smells like river mud and sweat and blood, and he's not sure if the wetness he feels where their cheeks press together is from her tears or his.

"Be careful!"

He clutches Octavia tighter, looks warily at the filthy princess.

Her first words to him are an order. Somehow he's not surprised.

"Her arm," she explains haltingly, pulling the hands that had started to reach out back to her chest. Even her eyes are the color of the sky. "She had to rip out a tracking device. It needs treatment."

"It's nothing," Octavia says. "I'll be fine." She pats his arm until he reluctantly sets her back on her feet.

"Bellamy, this is Clarke of the Sky People. And she has something we want."

That something is information.

Thanks to Clarke of the Sky People, his sister is the first earthborn to escape the Mountain.

Ever.

In spite of her obvious exhaustion, her hunger, her thirst, Clarke stands tall as she explains that she's learned much about the Mountain Men in the weeks she and her people have been inside.

Anya is silent as she listens, and the suspicion that lit her eyes the second she saw the princess of the Sky People has not lessened at all.

"Your people are being murdered," Clarke says flatly. "Either they're strung up and drained of their blood so the Mountain Men can live, or they're turned into monsters."

"Ripa?" Anya interrupts sharply, looking at Octavia.

His sister nods, and her hands at her side twitch as if she wishes Lincoln could reach forward and hold her. He can't, though, not now, not in front of their heda while she's supposed to be reporting, while she's supposed to be strong.

Octavia replies in English, and Bellamy tenses. It's clear insubordinance to not reply in Trigedasleng, and Octavia's making a dangerous statement by speaking in English so the sky girl can understand.

"The Mountain Men don't just control the reapers. They create them."

Anya is stone-faced.

Bellamy feels ill. They had all always wondered. There had been stories of reapers who wore the faces of the missing, of those thought dead. One of the neighboring clans had even tried capturing some, to try and bring them back. But their faces were all that remained of the people they had once been, and they died frothing and seizing—murderous strangers.

But now they know.

"Everyone in the mountain is in danger," Clarke says. "But I have people on the inside, who know how to take the mountain down. They're waiting for me to return with help. We're ready to fight whenever you are."

Anya considers her, then cuts her eyes back to his sister. "Octavia. You will tell us what you know."

She lifts her chin. "I know that I would be dead without Clarke. And I know that with her knowledge, we can take the Mountain."

Anya's eyes narrow. "Specifics."

At that, Octavia shrugs, and Bellamy clenches his fists.

Why is his sister being so insolent? Anya may have a soft spot for her old second, but not even her fondness will protect Octavia from her wrath if she continues acting and speaking this way.

"I know nothing more," Octavia claims.

"But I do," Clarke says. Her sky eyes have darkened, now like a river fathoms deep. "And once we have an alliance, I will tell you everything I know about Mount Weather."

"You are a single weak girl," Anya replies coldly. "You fell from the sky into a war you don't understand. Why should I trust anything you say?"

Clarke looks outraged, and somehow that makes her beautiful to him. "Because I'm telling the truth! Your people are dying. Every day, they drop drained bodies down chutes like they're garbage. They just started taking blood from my people, too, and it's only a matter of time before they escalate.

"We need to end this. Now."

She's utterly still, but he can see how much strength it takes her to remain that way. It amazes him, how strong this girl is. Didn't the old legends say that people who came from the sky were angels? How could she stand so strong and tall on the earth if she was never meant to touch it?

He's brought out of this thoughts by Anya's words.

"Sis em op."

Clarke of the Sky People doesn't shout, doesn't startle as her hands are bound and she's taken off toward the cells. But Bellamy wants to. The tense line of her back tells him Octavia wants to. The tendon standing out in Lincoln's neck tells him that even he wants to. The sky girl did the impossible and brought Lincoln's chosen back from the Mountain.

Bellamy can never repay her for that, and he knows Lincoln feels the same.

"Heda." Octavia's voice is fierce.

"She is a prisoner of war." Anya looks at the gathered Trigedakru. "Do not speak to her. Do not help her. Do not harm her. We will wait for the commander to decide her fate."

Octavia insists that they be the ones to guard Clarke, and in a rare show of leniency, Anya agrees. The commander has been summoned, but there is still time to wait.

Bellamy takes the first watch.

"You look like shit," Octavia tells him.

"So do you. And you smell like it, too," he says. "Go. Clean up and get some rest. And take Lincoln with you."

Bellamy has yet to come close to taking a chosen. There was no one in his village he is drawn to, and he's never wanted to look for a chosen in a different clan. But that doesn't mean he can't see the devotion between his sister and Lincoln, that he doesn't know how much they need to be alone together. She's his sister, and she would put off leaving with Lincoln if she thought Bellamy needed her right now. He does need her, but Lincoln needs her more, so he kisses her brow and then gently pushes her away.

"I'll be fine. Go."

Octavia bites her lip. "Keep her safe," she whispers. "It wasn't supposed to go like this."

He nods. "I will. Now go."

He carries a bucket of water and a bundle of rags with him into her cell. The light is dim, but enough to let him see the glint reflecting off her eyes as she watches him warily.

"I won't hurt you," he tells her. "Nobody else will, either."

She nods after a moment. "You're Bellamy."

"And you're the princess of the Sky People."

"What?"

He feels the heat in his face, though he's not sure why the slip makes him flush. "I…was assigned to watch you. The day your people fell. I heard what they called you."

"It's just a nickname. We didn't have princesses on the Ark."

"The Ark?"

She hums, but doesn't elaborate.

"You should wash," he tells her, and offers the rag and bucket. She stares at him, then glances down at her bound hands.

"Oh." Again, his face feels too warm. He doesn't think it's right to keep her locked up and tied like this. But if he unties her so she can wash, and someone sees, they'll both be in trouble.

"Will you let me help you?" he finds himself saying. He does his best to seem unthreatening, though he knows her eyes are cataloguing the sword strapped to his back, the daggers at his waist.

If she says no, it's her loss. But he hopes she says yes, if only because he can tell she's uncomfortable and he would do anything to make sure she carries no more burdens than she has to.

"Okay," she says quietly. "Thank you."

He leaves his weapons by the door and sits next to her. Dipping the first cloth into the water, he hesitates just before grasping her chin with his free hand. Her eyes never leave his as he drags the damp cloth over her skin, revealing the moon-pale skin he remembers.

There's even dried mud on her eyelids, and he asks her quietly to closer her eyes.

Eventually, she does, and as he wipes gently, carefully, her lips part and she lets out a little sigh. The heat of her breath warms his wrist, and it's all he can do to keep his hands steady.

He finishes with her face, the exposed skin of her neck, her hands above her bonds.

Bellamy reaches toward her wrists, waits for her to nod, pushes up the sleeves to bare as much skin as he can. Just peeking out from under the rope tying her is a peculiar scar on one wrist.

She sees him looking at it.

"That's how I knew," she says, and he starts to bathe her arms, tiny strokes of the cloth over filthy skin. He lets the words sit between them, and waits until he has to switch out the cloth for a new one to speak.

"Knew what?"

"That the Mountain Men were hiding something," she says. "We had these wristbands."

He nods. "I remember."

"You—" she pauses. "Well. They were supposed to be our links back to our people."

"There are more of you?"

She smiles faintly, and his heart races like it does when he's just spotted the first deer of the hunt.

"Hundreds and hundreds more," she says. "All still up in space. They sent us down to see if the earth was livable."

He's finished with her arms now, at least as much of the skin as he can reach, but he keeps wiping. He'd always imagined that clouds would feel soft, though he knew they were actually damp and insubstantial. But Clarke's skin—it's so soft, the way he had imagined those dreamy clouds to be.

Life is hard on the earth, and so are the earthborn; hard bodies and hard hearts and hard minds.

Bellamy's not sure he's ever touched anything as soft as her skin.

"Inside the mountain…" Clarke frowns faintly at her wrists. "When I woke up, they'd already taken my clothes, my…they'd taken everything I'd been wearing. And they were trying to pry off my wristband, and I told them not to, told them what it did."

She looks up at him, eyes fierce and furious. "And they held me down and cut it off while I screamed. They said later it was for decontamination, that they couldn't risk any outside matter being brought into contact with their people."

"But they were lying."

"Yeah. They were lying."

The next time he comes in to guard her, she's dressed like one of them, and he guesses Octavia must have pleaded with Anya until the woman agreed to unbind Clarke long enough to properly bathe and put on new clothes. Her wrists are bound again, but her hair is clean and messy, like a tangle of spiderwebs reflecting the sun.

He'd always thought that spiderwebs were strangely beautiful.

"Hello," Clarke says when he sits down across from her.

Bellamy nods. She's quiet as she studies him, and he studies her.

"Does it bother you?" he asks eventually. He doesn't know how long they've sat in silence.

She frowns. "Which part?" she asks. "Being kept in a cell like a criminal when all I'm trying to do is help both our peoples? Not knowing if my friends are dying, or already dead? Knowing that waiting for your commander is a fucking waste of time?"

He gestures at the strands falling into her eyes. "Your, ah, hair."

She bristles. "My hair?" She glowers at him for a minute, and yeah, he feels like he probably should have been more specific because of course all of those other things are far more pressing on her mind. Then she sighs, deflates. "Yes," she admits.

"I can fix it," he offers after an uncomfortable silence. He shouldn't, but he wants to.

"Please," she says stiffly.

He nods as if this isn't breaking every possible taboo his people have. His people have to earn their braids, and each one means something different. The act of braiding is an intimate thing, between family members or warriors and their seconds. Braiding someone's hair if they're not a part of one's family is tantamount to a declaration of marriage.

"If anyone asks, don't tell them who did it," Bellamy says, shifting onto his knees and behind her. He doubts she'll see anyone who would bother to ask, though.

His people think he and his sister are crazy for volunteering to guard the sky girl. He hears them whisper things like abomination, liar, spy, traitor. All kinds of terrible words. Only the threat of the commander arriving to answer Anya's summons is keeping them from setting fire to Clarke's cell in the night, he's sure.

But she brought his sister back to him, and she deserves better than what they've given her so far.

His people may hate her, but he'll always love her for that.

He cards his fingers through her hair, getting out all the tangles, and it's as light and soft as the spider silk it resembles. He tries to think of how to braid it. There are the simple ones, down the back of the skull in a single line like the one she wore the first day he saw her, but they're meant for children; Clarke has surely earned a better braid than that.

Bellamy can feel the slightest tremor as his fingers brush against her scalp, but she doesn't move more than that, sitting up straight, chin lifted regally.

He considers, and his fingers start to weave.

"I like Clarke's crown," Octavia tells him later. Lincoln is guarding Clarke while Octavia and Bellamy eat. "Amazing how she managed to do a braid like that with her hands bound."

He says nothing, just pulls a piece of meat off his skewer with his teeth.

"Bellamy," Octavia says softly. "You need to be careful."

"I'm always careful," he says, and his sister scoffs.

"I mean it," she says. "She's our ally, and a good person. But she's not one of us, Bellamy. People aren't going to like it if you get too close to her. I'm worried about you."

"Don't bother," he says, and pushes the rest of his food onto her plate before rising to his feet. "It's nothing."

It's not nothing. As days go by, he can see the agonizing strain of the wait taking its toll on Clarke, and he starts to talk more and more, trying to distract her.

His neighbors start eyeing him every time he leaves for her cell, and he asks her about what it was like to grow up in space.

She tells him, bit by bit, about Wells, and how what she'd thought was a betrayal was him trying to protect her, and about Raven, the oldest of them all, who'd fought her way onto the dropship to be with the boy she loved. About Murphy, who hated her but listened to her anyway, and about Miller, the guard's son she grew up just a few doors down from on the Ark.

Anya watches him grimly as he takes a warm fur from the storehouse on a night when the temperature is supposed to drop, and he drapes it around Clarke's shoulders as he prods her to tell him how Sky People train their healers.

She tells him about rationing medicine, and about oxygen deprivation, and about how the Ark is dying, if it isn't already dead.

Lincoln's worry matches Octavia's, but his gaze also shows understanding when Bellamy starts taking over more and more of the guard shifts until he's with Clarke almost every hour of the day and night, and he trades stories with her about his mother and her father.

It's not nothing, but it's only barely something, he thinks; it's the slightest hint of a possibility of feeling that he could push away at any time. He doesn't really care that he's never seen what she looks like when she laughs, and her smiles always look like they hurt, and that he has to work harder and harder every day just to draw words out of her.

Then the commander comes, and he's kicked out of the cell so the heda may speak with Clarke alone.

And then, just before the door locks behind the commander, he sees the daggers strapped to Lexa's waist, and the low, sick burn of fear in his gut makes him realize he's in love with Clarke of the Sky People.

"Clarke!" he calls quietly the second the commander leaves the cell and he's allowed back in. "Clarke, are you alright?"

"I'm alive," he hears, weary, and he sees her in the corner. Her shoulders are low, her head leaned back against the wall. It doesn't look comfortable, yet she doesn't seem to care to change the angle.

"What is it?" he asks her. Bellamy folds his legs underneath himself, and sits closer than he ever has before. It seems a painful luxury, allowing his knee to touch hers, but—he needs it, after hours of not knowing what was happening to Clarke.

His people have their own sense of justice, he knows. Just as he knows that to see that justice played out, his people will do whatever they think is necessary.

And it's the commander's job to decide what's necessary.

What it's necessary to do to Clarke.

"According to your heda," she says, spitting the word, "we're a bunch of trespassers. She wants what I know, I know she wants what I know, but she's not—she won't do anything about it until she calls the clans together."

His breath catches in his throat and she looks at him sharply.

"Is that unusual?" she demands, sitting up straighter. Her hand goes to his knee, gripping tightly.

He takes his time answering. The pressure of her nails digging through the thin leather of his summer gear starts to hurt, but still, he takes his time.

"It isn't…it's just not done," he says finally. Clarke frowns.

"What do you mean?"

He gives her a humorless half-smile. "Earth isn't a peaceful place, Clarke. And our war with the Mountain isn't our only war."

He tells her about Lexa, about how the young commander did what no other commander had managed to do and united the twelve clans—even the Ice Clan, their fiercest enemies in the north.

"The commander may not have acted as if she is concerned about your information, but if she's calling all the clans together, she's taking it as seriously as she can. You don't gather all of the earthborn together unless you're assembling a war party."

"Then why wouldn't she just admit it!" Clarke explodes, bounding to her feet and then whirling on him. "My friends are probably dying. They only planned on having to wait for me for a week, two at the most when I found Octavia and she told us about you."

"Clarke—"

"It's been three weeks," she says, anguished. "Bellamy, our blood filters radiation even better than yours does. If we don't—if they—"

He's still on the ground before her, and he realizes he's kneeling at her feet.

As a Trigedakru warrior, Bellamy is supposed to kneel only before his heda and before his chosen.

A part of him doesn't want to get up, but after lingering just a moment longer, he does.

"It will take days, many of them, for all of the clans to make it here," he explains softly. "And the commander will not move before then. It would be an insult to the alliance, to move against the enemy before all of the clans have assembled."

"So more of my friends will die," she says, voice empty. "While we wait for politics to run their course."

Yes. More of her friends will die, if Clarke is right and the Mountain Men have started taking them too. But when he opens his mouth to force himself to agree, instead he says, "No."

"No?"

He swallows, mouth suddenly dry with terror.

What the hell is he doing?

"No," he repeats, and his hands go to the dagger at his waist.

Clarke doesn't move as he takes her hands and cuts through the bonds, not even to flinch.

"Bellamy?"

"What do you need?" he asks, urgent. "To save them?"

"I—" For the first time, she looks truly startled. "I need...help."

He nods. "Alright. I'll help you."

"But you—"

"I'll be fine," he says, and he'll be homeless, clanless, if he survives this, but right now, that sounds better than never hearing the sound of Clarke when she laughs, or what she might look like when she smells one of the spring daffodils, or when she drinks from the river after the mountain snows finally begin to thaw and the water turns icy cold. "But your friends won't be. I'll help you," he says again, and stops rubbing the chafed skin of her wrists when he realizes what he's doing.

Clarke just stares at him.

"Why do you care?" she asks suddenly.

Bellamy is silent.

"Really. Tell me. They're not your people. Why are you risking this?"

"You are my people," he replies, soft, though it tastes like agony.

She looks at him, hard, then surges up to press a painful, biting kiss to his mouth. When she draws back, he licks his lips and tastes blood.

"And you are mine," she says, decisive, and turns toward the door. Before he can say anything, though, her shoulders slump and she sighs. "We need to wait for dark, don't we?"

"It would be smarter," he says. "A lot easier. I could try to gather some food, maybe some weapons."

"And I'll sit here, waiting like a good little prisoner," she grumbles, and glances from the cut pile of rope on the ground to him. "What do I do if someone comes in and sees my hands free?" she asks. "You kind of jumped the gun with the whole dramatically cutting me free thing."

"It—you—ugh," Bellamy says, flushing. "Pretend."

Clarke smiles grimly. "I'm good at that."

The two worst punishments that the Trigedakru uses are death by a thousand cuts, and exile.

Being clanless and alive is considered by many to be worse than the agonizing death.

Because of this, it is easy for Bellamy to slip through the village to his own little house. It feels stale inside, and cold, because he's barely been inside throughout the last few weeks. But his stores of dried food are still there, the purple apples sliced into rings, the deer jerky, a sack of the nuts he likes to save for special occasions.

He packs it all, along with his small medical pouch and his extra knives. He dresses in layers of his own clothes until he's sweating under furs meant for deep winter—but Clarke only has the one fur he brought her, and she'll need more as they travel if she's to keep warm. It'll look less strange if he's wearing the furs when he returns to her cell than if he's carrying them.

There's more in his house—a couple precious books, pages crumbly with age, and a sketch someone had done of their mother years ago. These are the things that made this his home, and he knows he's a huge idiot, knows that this doesn't make sense, but somehow they're just things now, and his home is elsewhere.

He leaves them behind. It hurts, but he does.

Turning around after a last look at where he's lived his entire life, Bellamy nearly has a heart attack when he sees his sister standing a few feet behind him, her brow wrinkled in irritation and a sneer on her lips.

"What?" he asks, nervous. He knows if he told her what he was doing, Octavia would follow him. Their bond is not one-sided, and she wouldn't willingly let him leave.

But—the path he faces now is not an easy one, and regardless of how strong his sister is, it's not one he would ever wish on her.

At least, that's what he tells himself. Another part of him wants to die at the thought of leaving her behind, even if it means a better, easier life for her.

"You're leaving," she says flatly.

"You have a home here," he replies quietly.

Octavia looks at him with disgust. "And what, you're just planning on storming the mountain with a single sky girl for backup?"

"She knows the mountain," he defends weakly. "Clarke will get us in."

"She might get you in, but will she get you out?" Octavia says, and color is high in her cheeks while her eyes shine with angry tears. "Bell, the two of you are committing suicide."

"I told her I would help her," he says, and drops his gaze. "You'll be alright."

Bellamy hears her breath hitch, either in anger or sorrow, and then the rustle of her clothes as she storms out of the cabin they grew up in together.

When he makes it back to the cell with only a few odd looks from his neighbors when they see him so bundled up, Clarke takes one look at his face.

"You don't have to go with me."

"I said I would."

"No," Clarke says. "They're not yours, Bellamy. You should stay."

"I'm going," he says, and starts transferring the warm clothes from his body to hers.

They wait until the village is quiet, and only those on patrol are still awake. It's all too easy to lead Clarke out of the cell and to the weakest point of the village's perimeter—threats are supposed to come from the outside, and no one ever expects anyone to try to leave.

Where Bellamy expects to find Kena on guard, he finds only darkness. Her spot is empty, and Bellamy freezes, putting his arm out so Clarke stops with a quiet oof.

"What is it?" she whispers, and he shakes his head slowly.

"Something's off."

"Your head's going to be off if you don't hurry up," he hears hissed out of the shadows, and his head whips toward the sound.

His sister melts out of the trees, her sword strapped to her back and her hair braided tightly away from her face. War paint surrounds her eyes, making the green of her irises brighter than ever even in the dim light radiating from the stars and the village.

"I told Kena I'd take her patrol tonight," she says. "But we need to leave."

"Octavia?" Clarke asks. "What are you doing here?" As she speaks, Lincoln appears behind Octavia, also ready for battle. Where his sister goes, Lincoln follows.

"I know where my loyalties lie," she declares with one more dirty look thrown at Bellamy. "You helped me escape the mountain the first time. And I'll help you escape it the second."

Bellamy never could have asked her to go with him.

But he's not going to tell her she has to stay.

"I thought you said this was a suicide mission," he says to her when they've been walking for half an hour, and are long beyond the walls of their village.

Octavia sighs. "I said the two of you were a suicide mission. But the four of us…well, we might stand a chance. Maybe half a chance."

Bellamy slings his arm around her, careful of her sword, and hugs her to him tightly so she can't tell his eyes are burning with tears. She endures it for a moment, then shoves him away.

"Go talk to Clarke and leave me alone," she says. "I'm still mad at you."

"I love you, O," he says, and she rolls her eyes.

"Yeah, yeah, love you too. Now go away."

Bellamy obeys.

Lincoln is badly injured on the way through the tunnels when reapers attack, but they kill the reapers and Clarke uses their med kit to do a quick but sufficient set of stitches on the torn flesh of his she looks at the cart on the tracks next to where the reapers had been feasting, and he wishes he could urge her to turn away, stop counting the limp forms piled on top of one another—but he knows she needs to do this.

When she finally turns away, her face is a terrible combination of fury and fear.

"We need to hurry," she says, and then they run.

She whispers between pants as they sprint. "Once they realize a group of reapers have been taken out, they'll know we're coming through the tunnels. We need to be ready."

"For what?" Lincoln asks, and when Octavia jerks to a stop, they all do.

"For him," she says, and bares her teeth at the wide-eyed guard in front of them in the tunnels. He's dressed in some kind of uniform, and his helmet is in his hand while the other hand is buried in his hair.

"Bad time to scratch an itch," Octavia says.

"Don't!" Clarke barks as he reaches for the small device attached to his waist. He freezes, his eyes darting nervously between them all. "Call them and you're dead."

"He has a gun," Bellamy says lowly, and stares at the thing holstered at the guard's hip.

He means to warn the others, but it seems to act as a reminder for the guard instead. He pulls the gun out, aims it at them, and Octavia dives into a roll to come up at his feet and slash his chest before he can even get his finger on the trigger.

Clarke stares at the fallen body, then picks up the gun. Bellamy barely suppresses the wild urge to yell at her to drop it. "The walkie might be useful," she says, and takes that too, clipping it to her own waist. Then she rummages through the other pouches attached to the dead man's body, pulling out a piece of plastic and a strange silver cylinder.

"Just in case," she says, and she and Octavia exchange a look, nodding. "Okay. Let's keep moving."

They find another cart near a door, this one with two more bodies. As Clarke tries the plastic card on the lock, jaw tight, another body falls with a dull thud from the chute above.

She turns, looks over her shoulder as the door opens.

Bellamy hesitates, then grasps her shoulder. She covers his hand with hers, squeezes.

"The guard wasn't wearing a suit, Bellamy," she says. "He was outside, and he didn't need a suit anymore."

As Lincoln and Octavia cautiously make their way into the true inside of the mountain, Clarke says, "I think…I think I'm going to kill them all, Bellamy. I don't really want to. But they…"

"Jus drein jus daun," he tells her. He understands.

"Yeah." She straightens, and his hand falls away from her. "Blood must have blood."

Once they're inside of the mountain, Octavia turns to Clarke. "I'll go to the cages." A muscle in her jaw jumps, and he reaches out to touch it. He and his sister are so alike. Octavia spares him a look, her eyes briefly soft, before they're flinty again, bright green and furious.

Clarke nods. "Keep them quiet, show them the way out." She tosses the metal cylinder she'd taken from the dead man to Octavia. "Give them that, in case they run into reapers. And if any of them want to stay and fight…"

Octavia grins a terrible, awful grin. "If they're strong enough, they will."

"Clarke," Lincoln says. "Be careful."

She offers him a brittle smile. "I will. Thank you, Lincoln, for helping. I know they're not your—I'm not—"

"You are," he says, gentle, and then the kindness on his face is replaced by determination. "We need to go."

Before they do, though, Octavia seizes both Clarke and Bellamy in a crushing hug. "I'll kill you if you die in this godforsaken hole," she growls, and then takes off at run with Lincoln on her heels.

"This way," Clarke says, voice hoarse, and grabs his hand. "Bellamy?"

"Yes?" he asks.

"Please don't let go."

He holds on.

"Together."

This is the way the mountain falls.

Not because of an army, but because of a girl who fell from the sky and a few of her friends.

When they make it out, Bellamy and Clarke, Octavia and Lincoln, the remains of Clarke's people and all of the earthborn who stayed to face their captors, it's strange to realize it's midday. There was no sunlight in the godforsaken place, just artificial lights that hurt Bellamy's eyes.

It seems like it should be night, like there should be a darkness outside to match the mountain, but instead it's the bright light of autumn, already trying to wash away the ghosts of the dead they left in their wake.

But—incredibly—they're alive. Covered in sweat and gore and weighed down with exhaustion, but—they're alive.

Most of them.

"Eighteen dead," Clarke says bleakly, looking back at the mountain. Though she doesn't add them, he knows she's also counting the hundreds of others that had to die for them to be free.

"Eighty-two alive," he reminds her. "And hundreds of the earthborn. You did good, Clarke."

She sighs and turns to him. Her people are waiting in a tight cluster behind them, and they look overwhelmed, amazed to be outside again. He nearly expects them to drop and kiss the ground like they did that very first day, but.

They're not children anymore.

"What do we do now?" Clarke asks. She sounds so tired, sick.

He reaches for her, and their hands intertwine. When he pulls her closer, she finally lets herself lean into him.

Bellamy thinks about it, about the fall of the mountain, about the army still amassing, not knowing the enemy was destroyed. There's only one thing to do, only one place to go.

He turns her in the direction the sun rises.

"We go to the sea."

The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea. —Isak Dinesen