[Dropship — Day 0, Atmospheric Entry]
The harness bit into his collarbone and the world was screaming.
Cal Mercer's first conscious thought in this body — this unfamiliar, too-young, wrong-shaped body — was that he was about to die in it. The dropship bucked like something alive, shaking hard enough to rattle teeth, and a hundred teenagers were strapped into metal seats around him, most of them howling.
Not all of them from fear. Some were laughing.
Eight months. He'd had eight months on the Ark to prepare for this moment, and his preparation amounted to a racing pulse and hands gripping armrests that were bolted to a ship older than anyone aboard it. Eight months since he'd opened eyes that weren't his, in a cell that wasn't his, with a name stitched into a jumpsuit that belonged to a boy who wasn't there anymore. Callum Mercer. Arrested for accessing restricted engineering archives. Quiet kid. No friends. No enemies. No one who'd look twice.
Perfect.
Before that — before the Ark, before the cell, before Callum Mercer — there'd been a highway in the rain and headlights that came too fast. The memory lived in his chest like a fist. He didn't visit it. There was nothing useful in it. Evan Cole had died on wet asphalt at twenty-six, and someone or something had dropped him into a steel coffin orbiting a dead planet, and he'd spent eight months learning to answer to a name that tasted wrong in his mouth.
Cal now. Just Cal.
The lights flickered. Emergency red washed every face in the cabin and made them all look wounded.
Three rows ahead, a blonde girl was arguing with a dark-skinned boy who sat rigid beside her, jaw set, absorbing her words the way a wall absorbs rain. Clarke Griffin. Wells Jaha. Cal could put names to the faces because he'd watched this story play out on a screen in another life — a show called The 100, binged over two weekends during finals week, half-remembered through the fog of too much caffeine and not enough sleep. He remembered the broad strokes. Who lived. Who didn't. Which decisions cracked the world open.
Wells Jaha died on Day Three. Charlotte — a twelve-year-old with dead eyes and a knife — would drive a blade into his neck because her parents had been floated by his father.
Cal's grip tightened on the armrest.
A guy two rows to the left was unstrapping his harness. Floppy hair, easy grin, the kind of reckless confidence that got people killed. Finn Collins. He kicked free of the seat and floated, weightless in the shaking cabin, arms spread wide.
"Check it out!" Finn shouted. "Your dad floated me after all!"
Laughter. More kids reached for their buckles. Cal's stomach dropped, and it had nothing to do with atmospheric entry.
"Stay in your seats!" Clarke yelled, straining against her own harness. "If we hit—"
The dropship slammed into atmosphere like a car hitting a wall. The laughter stopped. Two boys who'd unstrapped — teenagers, sixteen maybe, faces Cal didn't recognize from the show — catapulted upward and struck the bulkhead with sounds that were too wet, too final.
Then impact.
Cal's vision whited out. His skull rang. The harness dug so deep into his chest that his next breath came as a shallow, burning gasp. Something had happened to the lights — half were dead, the other half strobing. Dust and smoke filled the cabin. Somewhere to his left, a girl was sobbing. Somewhere ahead, metal groaned.
A low hum started behind his eyes. Not pain, exactly — more like static from a radio searching for a frequency. It had been there since Day One on the Ark, this buzzing just beneath the surface of his skull, flaring when he was stressed and fading when he slept. Nanomachines — at least, that's what he'd decided they were, because the alternative was a brain tumor and there was nothing he could do about that. Billions of microscopic machines fused to his cells, dormant and damaged from whatever process had dropped him into this world. He couldn't feel them do anything useful. They just hummed and gave him headaches.
There were other things too. Instincts that didn't belong to Callum Mercer or Evan Cole. A pull in his bones when he touched the Ark's metal floors, like his body wanted to push through them, reach for something deeper. A certainty, when he stared at his palms for too long, that he could make things from nothing — objects from skin and fat and molecular knowledge. Powers that belonged in fiction, layered onto a body that was struggling to hold them.
None of it worked yet. The earthbending — if that's what it was — produced nothing but trembling fingers. The creation instinct was just that: instinct, with no output. The nanomachines ran their slow repair cycle and gave him fevers that came and went like weather.
He was a loaded gun with a jammed mechanism, and the world was about to get very dangerous very fast.
The main hatch hissed. Pressure equalized. Something clicked, heavy and mechanical, and then light — golden, unfiltered, impossible light — cut through the smoke in the cabin like a blade through cloth.
Bellamy Blake was already at the door. Tall, dark-haired, the kind of jawline that made people follow you even when you were wrong. He'd shot Chancellor Jaha to get on this ship. Cal knew that. Nobody else did.
"Stop," Bellamy said, one arm barring the exit. His voice carried the easy authority of someone who'd decided he was in charge and would keep deciding until reality proved him wrong. "The air could be toxic."
"If the air's toxic, we're all dead anyway." Clarke pushed through the crowd toward the hatch.
But it was Octavia who went first. She slipped under Bellamy's arm — small, fierce, hair wild — and dropped onto the ramp. Her boots hit dirt. Actual Earth dirt, brown and soft and ancient.
She spread her arms, head tipped back, and screamed: "We're back, bitches!"
The hundred surged. Cal stayed in his seat.
He watched them pour past him — kids, all of them, the oldest barely twenty, convicted of crimes that ranged from assault to stealing medicine to being born. They hit the ground whooping and spinning, ripping wristbands off, shoving each other, climbing trees. A girl dropped to her knees and pressed her face into the grass. A boy was already trying to start a fight.
Cal unstrapped. His legs were shaky. The bruises from impact were announcing themselves — left shoulder, both knees, a deep ache along his ribs where the harness had caught. He stepped down the ramp.
Grass. Under his boots, grass. Green and thick and alive, bending under his weight. The air tasted like rain and soil and something floral he couldn't name. Wind moved through the trees and the sound of it — leaves against leaves, a rustling chorus that went on forever in every direction — hit him somewhere behind the sternum.
He touched the nearest tree. Bark under his fingertips: rough, warm from the sun, real. One hundred percent undeniably real.
A laugh escaped him. Short, sharp, not entirely sane. He pressed his palm flat against the trunk and just stood there for five seconds, breathing. The hum in his skull flared — the nanomachines registering atmosphere, radiation levels, oxygen content, all the background data they were too broken to report.
Enough.
He turned from the tree and walked toward the supply crates bolted to the underside of the dropship. Someone had already pried one open and tossed the contents — ration packs, mostly — into the dirt. Cal crouched and started counting.
Three crates. Approximately two hundred ration bars per crate. Six hundred bars for a hundred people. At two bars per person per day, that was three days of food. The dropship's water recycler was cracked — he could see the fracture line from here. No water source within immediate sight. No tools. No weapons except whatever they could rip from the ship.
Three days.
He kept counting. Sorted the scattered rations back into piles. Found a med kit — basic, barely stocked. Found two tarps. Found a bundle of wire that someone had stuffed into the corner of Crate Three alongside six hand-held radios, four of which were broken.
The hum behind his eyes pulsed, and for half a second his palm itched — a sensation like something pressing outward from beneath the skin, wanting to form. The creation instinct, knocking. He closed his fist and the itch faded.
Not yet. Not here. Too many eyes.
Night came faster than he expected. Without the Ark's artificial cycle, darkness arrived like a door closing. Someone built a fire near the dropship — poorly, using green wood that smoked and spat — and the hundred gathered around it in loose clusters. Already factions were forming. Bellamy's people, the ones who'd torn off their wristbands and threw them into the fire, cheering each time a signal blinked out on some monitor up in space. Clarke's people — smaller, quieter, clustered near the med kit. And the rest, uncommitted, drifting between warmth and loyalty wherever it was offered.
Bellamy climbed onto a crate. Firelight carved his face into something sharper than it was.
"They sent us down here to die," he said. The camp went quiet. "No food. No weapons. No adults. Just us and whatever's out there." He pointed at the treeline. "The Ark doesn't get to tell us what to do anymore. There are no laws here. No rules. No Councils."
A beat. His voice dropped, then rose, riding the rhythm of a crowd that wanted to believe.
"Whatever the hell we want!"
They roared. Cal didn't. He stood at the edge of the firelight with a ration bar in each hand — his body burning calories at a rate that made no biological sense, the nanomachines feeding on everything he ate — and watched a hundred teenagers choose chaos over survival.
He ate the second bar and started walking the camp perimeter, counting paces, noting sight lines, mapping the terrain by firelight and moonlight and the faint green glow of bioluminescent moss that clung to rocks along the eastern ridge.
---
Three in the morning. The fire had burned to coals. Most of the camp was asleep — sprawled on tarps, huddled against the dropship hull, curled into each other for warmth. A few sentries Bellamy had posted were already dozing at their positions.
Cal sat on an overturned crate with a stick, scratching lines into the dirt. A rough map. The dropship at center. The river he could hear to the south — maybe a fifteen-minute walk. The ridgeline east. The treeline west. And somewhere beyond all of it, Mount Weather, fully stocked with enough supplies to keep them alive for years, guarded by people who would harvest their bone marrow to walk in sunlight.
He scratched out the water route and redrew it, factoring the slope.
Across the camp, a figure sat alone by the dying fire. Wells Jaha. Knees drawn up, staring at the embers, isolated by a hatred he'd volunteered for. He'd gotten himself arrested so Clarke wouldn't face the Ground alone. She hadn't spoken to him since landing.
Three days. That's how long Wells had, if things followed the script.
Cal dropped the stick, stood, and walked toward the eastern ridge where the ground was softer and the water table might be shallow enough to reach with a trench. Behind him, Wells sat motionless by the fire — hated and breathing, and Cal was already building the list of things that had to change before breathing stopped being something Wells got to do.
Author's Note / Promotion:
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:
🪙 Silver Tier ($6): Read 10 chapters ahead of the public site.
👑 Gold Tier ($9): Get 15-20 chapters ahead of the public site.
💎 Platinum Tier ($15): The ultimate experience. Get new chapters the second I finish them . No waiting for weekly drops, just pure, instant access.
Your support helps me write more .
👉 Find it all at patreon.com/fanficwriter1
Author's Note / Promotion:
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:
🪙 Silver Tier ($6): Read 10 chapters ahead of the public site.
👑 Gold Tier ($9): Get 15-20 chapters ahead of the public site.
💎 Platinum Tier ($15): The ultimate experience. Get new chapters the second I finish them . No waiting for weekly drops, just pure, instant access.
Your support helps me write more .
👉 Find it all at patreon.com/fanficwriter1