The forest was violently, almost unnaturally beautiful. Sunlight filtered through the dense, hyper-green canopy in thick shafts, illuminating floating pollen that looked like gold dust. The group took their time pushing through the heavy ferns, taking in a world none of them had ever seen outside of a faded textbook screen.
Finn, bouncing back from his earlier dressing down, snapped a vibrant, oddly shaped yellow flower off a creeping vine. He flashed a charming, easy smile and stepped toward Octavia, moving to tuck the bloom behind her ear.
Octavia smoothly took a step back, dodging his hand. Her eyes flicked over Finn's shoulder, lingering on the quiet, confident way Aleksander moved through the brush. "I'm good, Spacewalker," she said, a playful smirk tugging at her lips.
Finn dropped his hand, a little deflated.
Jasper jogged up beside him, clapping a hand on his shoulder. "Now, that, my friend, is game."
Monty pushed past them, squinting at the vine Finn had just touched. "That, my friend, is poison sumac."
Octavia whipped around, suddenly looking very alarmed. "What? It is?"
Monty casually plucked one of the remaining flowers. "The flowers aren't poisonous. They're medicinal, calming, actually."
Jasper pointed a thumb at his best friend, grinning. "His family grows all the pharmaceuticals on The Ark."
Monty raised the flower toward his mouth, fully intending to chew on a petal to prove his point.
He didn't even see Aleksander move. One second, Aleksander was three paces away; the next, his hand clamped firmly around Monty's wrist, stopping the flower inches from the boy's lips.
"I wouldn't do that," Aleksander said, his voice quiet but carrying absolute authority.
Monty blinked, startled. "It's just sumac. It's safe."
"It was safe, on the Ark," Aleksander corrected, his grip steady before he smoothly let go. "The strains your family grows were genetically stabilized in a sterile, climate-controlled hydroponics bay. Down here? This flora has been soaking in ionizing radiation for ninety-seven years. Radiation alters cellular structures and alkaloid production. What acts as a mild sedative in space could cause severe neurotoxicity or complete respiratory failure on the ground. You don't know what you're putting in your mouth."
Monty went pale. He immediately dropped the flower as if it had caught fire and wiped his hand frantically on his jacket.
A few yards ahead, Clarke sighed in frustration. "Hey, guys, would you try to keep up?"
Finn jogged up to catch her, looking around at the massive trees and vibrant moss. "Come on, Clarke. How do you block all this out?"
Clarke stopped, turning to face him. The tension in her shoulders hadn't dropped since the dropship doors opened. "Well, it's simple. I wonder, 'why haven't we seen any animals?'" She gestured to the quiet, empty woods around them. "Maybe it's because there are none. Maybe we've already been exposed to enough radiation to kill us. Sure is pretty, though. Come on."
She turned to keep walking, but Aleksander's voice brought her to a dead halt.
"Or worse," he mutters.
The group froze. Octavia, Jasper, Monty, and Finn exchanged uneasy glances. The heavy, peaceful silence of the forest suddenly felt distinctly threatening.
Clarke frowned, stepping back toward him. "Worse? What's worse than everything being dead?"
Aleksander looked past her, his dark eyes scanning the dense, shadowy tree line. Even without dropping his glamour, his Fey empathy could feel the faint, erratic pulses of life out there—things that definitely didn't belong in the Ark's old zoology files.
"Nature abhors a vacuum, Clarke,"
Aleksander said smoothly. "The radiation wiped out a lot, sure. But life adapts. The animals that survived didn't just stay the same. Ninety-seven years of high-level background radiation doesn't just kill; it forces hyper-accelerated adaptation. The possibility that the wildlife out there has mutated into something entirely unrecognizable... is not small."
A cold breeze rustled through the canopy, shaking the ferns. Suddenly, the shadows between the massive tree trunks seemed a lot deeper. Jasper swallowed hard, gripping the straps of his goggles, and Monty moved a little closer to the center of the group.
Clarke stared at Aleksander for a long second, processing the cold logic of his words. She tightened her grip on her map. "Then we'd better get to Mount Weather before we find out what they look like. Keep moving."
They fell back into a steady, albeit cautious, rhythm. The conversation drifted, an unspoken agreement to distract themselves from the creeping paranoia Aleksander had just planted in their heads.
Finn dropped back a few paces to walk alongside Jasper and Monty. "I got to know what you two did to get busted."
Monty smirked, pushing a low-hanging branch out of the way. "Sumac is not the only herb in the garden, if you know what I mean."
Jasper shoved Monty's shoulder, rolling his eyes. "Yeah, well, someone forgot to replace what we took before the guard shift change."
"Someone has apologized, like, a thousand times," Monty shot back, though he was grinning.
Jasper shook his head, turning his attention to the girl walking a few steps ahead of them. "How about you, Octavia? What'd they get you for?"
Octavia didn't even look back. She just kept her eyes on the path, her voice tight and utterly devoid of the playful energy she'd had minutes ago. "Being born."
The easygoing atmosphere evaporated instantly. Jasper winced, rubbing the back of his neck, instantly regretting the question. "That is... so not game."
Up ahead, Clarke suddenly stopped dead in her tracks. She threw her hand up in a sharp fist, motioning for the entire group to freeze and join her. She dropped into a low crouch, parting the heavy fronds of a fern with extreme care.
The group crept up behind her, holding their breath as they peered through the brush.
Just fifty yards away, standing in a sun-drenched clearing, was a deer. It was grazing peacefully on a patch of tall, vibrant grass. From behind, it looked completely normal—tawny brown fur, a twitching white tail, entirely mundane. It was a beautiful, living, breathing piece of Earth.
Finn let out a low exhale, his smug grin immediately returning. He leaned over, nudging Aleksander's arm. "No animals, huh? And so much for your scary mutant theory, Alpha Station. Looks exactly like the pictures in the Earth Skills archives to me. Just a regular deer."
Aleksander didn't blink. His dark eyes remained locked on the creature. His Fey empathy was already reaching out, and what he felt bouncing back made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. It was a strange, overlapping biological rhythm. Two distinct heartbeats.
"Watch," Aleksander replied simply.
Confident he had won the argument, Finn shifted his weight to get a better look. His heavy boot came down hard on a dry piece of deadwood.
Snap.
The sound cracked through the quiet clearing. The deer froze instantly. Slowly, it lifted its head and turned to look directly at the tree line.
A collective, horrified gasp ripped through the teenagers.
It wasn't one head. Growing out of a thick, distorted neck was a second, fully formed head. Its unblinking, milky eyes stared blankly in their direction, while the primary head twitched its ears in high alert. The second jaw was slightly malformed, teeth grinding sideways in a sickening rhythm.
Jasper stumbled backward, nearly tripping over a tree root, his face completely bloodless. Clarke's hand flew to her mouth. Even Finn's smug grin vanished, his eyes wide with sheer, paralyzed shock as his brain short-circuited trying to process the impossibility in front of him.
Aleksander just stood there, his expression perfectly composed. His hyper-analytical mind instantly categorized the teratogenic mutation, calculating the extreme levels of ambient radiation required to cause such stable genetic divergence.
"Just like I feared," Aleksander muttered softly, his voice completely flat.
Spooked by the noise and the sudden movement in the brush, the two-headed deer pivoted on its hind legs and bolted, vanishing into the deep, shadowy woods in a heartbeat.
Nobody moved for a long time. They just stared at the empty clearing, the reality of the ground finally crashing down on them.
Miles above the overgrown, wild forests of Earth, the sterile, metallic corridors of Go-Sci Station offered no comfort. The air smelled of antiseptic and ozone, a sharp contrast to the coppery scent of blood that Abby Griffin couldn't quite wash from her hands.
Chancellor Thelonious Jaha had been shot. The surgery to extract the bullet and repair the massive internal hemorrhaging had been grueling, a desperate fight against the Ark's dwindling medical supplies. Abby had barely closed the final suture before she was marching down the corridor toward the Earth Monitoring Station.
She stepped through the heavy sliding doors into a darkened room illuminated only by the cool, blue glow of a hundred vital-sign monitors.
Callie Cartwig, her closest friend and confidante, turned away from the primary console. The stress of the day was etched deeply into the lines of Callie's face. "Hey, Ab," she greeted softly, her voice barely above a whisper. "How's the Chancellor doing?"
Abby let out a ragged exhale, rubbing her temples to fend off a looming migraine. "Ask me again if he makes it through the night." She dropped her hand, stepping closer to the massive display screen tracking the delinquents. Several of the bio-telemetry rings were glowing a steady, healthy green. But down at the bottom of the board, a few had already flatlined into a cold, lifeless black.
Abby's stomach dropped. "Who else did we lose?"
A young medical apprentice manning the telemetry desk pulled up the data logs, his brow furrowing as he read the names attached to the dead signals. "Murphy and Mbege. Both named John."
Standing in the shadows near the corner of the room, Councilman Marcus Kane stepped forward. His posture was rigid, his expression an unreadable, pragmatic mask. "Neither was injured during the landing," Kane noted coldly. "Their vitals stabilized after the dropship impact."
The apprentice nodded, tapping the screen to bring up a graph of their final moments. "I concur, Councilman. Something else killed these two. Look at the data spike. One second, they were completely fine, and the next... bang. Total cessation of biological function."
Abby stepped in front of the console, her clinical instincts immediately overriding her exhaustion. "Then it isn't radiation."
Kane sighed, a condescending edge bleeding into his voice. He looked at the black screens as if they were a foregone conclusion. "Come on, Abby. Wishful thinking isn't good science."
"It's not wishful thinking, Marcus," Abby fired back, her brown eyes hardening as she turned to face him. She pointed a sharp finger at the data graphs. "It's pathology. One second fine, the next bang—that isn't how exposure to radiation presents. Radiation poisoning is a progressive decay. They would show elevated heart rates, respiratory distress, and a gradual failure of their nervous systems over hours, not milliseconds."
Kane crossed his arms, entirely unmoved by her medical assessment. "Well, it could be instantaneous if there was enough of it on the ground. A highly concentrated pocket, perhaps."
"No," Abby argued, her voice rising in the quiet room. She looked back at the board, her eyes locking onto the blinking green light labeled Griffin, Clarke and Stark, Aleksander. "If there was enough of it to cause instantaneous biological shutdown, they would all be dead."
She placed her hands on the edge of the metal console, leaning her weight against it as the overwhelming weight of her daughter's survival pressed down on her chest. She stared at the green lights, her voice dropping to a desperate, quiet plea."Please... let me be right."