The forest blurred into a chaotic smear of green and brown as they sprinted blindly away from the gorge. The sheer, suffocating terror of the unknown pushed them to run until their lungs burned. Aleksander stayed at the rear of the group, effortlessly keeping pace. His Phoenix stamina meant he wasn't even breathing hard, but his mind was racing at a million miles an hour, constantly checking their flanks and listening for the sound of pursuit.
Suddenly, Monty's boot caught on a thick, gnarled tree root. He went down hard, slamming into the dirt and sliding through the damp leaves.
"Clarke! Come on," Finn yelled from the front, skidding to a halt and looking back frantically.
Octavia dropped to her knees beside Monty, grabbing his arm. "Monty. Come on!"
"We got to go!" Finn urged, his eyes darting to the shadows between the trees.
"Monty, get up!" Octavia pulled on him, but Monty wasn't moving. He was frozen, staring at the ground just inches from his face.
Aleksander stepped up beside them, reaching down to haul Monty to his feet, but his eyes locked onto what the boy was staring at. Half-buried in the moss was a human skull. But the bone structure was completely wrong. The eye sockets were massive and asymmetrical, and the jawbone was elongated and grotesquely malformed.
Finn backed up, his face pale. "Who are they?"
Above them, a murder of crows suddenly erupted from the canopy, squawking violently as they fled whatever was moving through the woods.
Clarke stared at the deformed bone, the horrific reality of the ground sinking in. "What are they?"
Octavia swallowed hard, her voice trembling. "We are so screwed."
Aleksander's jaw clenched. His hyper-analytical mind was already processing the severe cranial mutation, filing it away as proof of extreme radiotrophic adaptation. They need to keep moving, his logic dictated. Get back to camp. Rally Bellamy, get the assault rifle, and return with overwhelming numbers. Showing the Dark Fey magic or the Phoenix fire in front of them right now compromises everything.
Then, it happened.Distant scream
The sound tore through the quiet forest—a raw, blood-curdling shriek of pure agony echoing from the direction of the river.
"Jasper," Clarke gasped, spinning around. "He's alive."
The tactical, calculating part of Aleksander's brain screamed at him to stick to the plan. Retreat. Conceal the power. But the sheer, visceral suffering in that scream hit his Fey empathy like a physical blow. The rigid walls of logic he relied on suddenly shattered. He couldn't leave the boy to be tortured. Cover story be damned.
Aleksander didn't say a word. He just snapped.
Abandoning the retreat entirely, Aleksander spun on his heel and launched himself back toward the gorge. He moved with a terrifying, predatory speed, a blur of dark motion tearing through the brush.
"Alex!" Clarke shouted, immediately breaking into a sprint to chase after him.
"Clarke, wait! Wait! Wait!" Finn yelled, scrambling to keep up as the entire group reversed course, drawn back into the danger zone by Aleksander's sudden charge. "Stay out of the trees!"
Aleksander burst through the final line of heavy ferns, his hands twitching near his pockets, fully prepared to pull his karambits and slaughter whoever was standing there. He hit the rocky ledge of the gorge, his eyes instantly locking onto the massive oak tree on the opposite bank.
He froze.
Clarke, Finn, Octavia, and Monty stumbled out of the brush a second later, gasping for air as they lined up along the ledge.
"He was right there," Finn panted, pointing a trembling finger across the rushing water.
Aleksander's dark eyes narrowed, his Fey vision cutting through the shadows on the far bank. The heavy wooden spear was gone. The Mount Weather sign lay discarded in the dirt. The only thing left on the massive trunk of the oak tree was a sickening smear of fresh, bright red blood.
Monty gripped his hair, completely frantic. "No. Where is he?"
"They took him," Clarke whispered, her voice hollow with defeat.
Aleksander stared at the empty tree, his jaw set so tight his teeth ground together. He had been too slow. His insistence on logic over instinct had cost them the window. He turned away from the river, his expression hardening into something cold, ancient, and deeply dangerous.
"Then we go back, and we arm up," Aleksander stated, his voice completely devoid of its usual calm detachment, replaced by a lethal edge. "Because whoever took him just started a war."
The moment Clarke and the others broke through the tree line into the camp, the chaos of the delinquents hit them like a wall. A crowd had formed near the center of the camp. In the middle of it, Wells had Murphy pinned to the dirt, a scavenged piece of sharpened metal pressed directly against the older boy's throat.
"Wells! Let him go!" Clarke screamed, sprinting forward and shoving her way through the circle of teenagers.
Murphy scrambled backward, coughing and glaring. "Whoa! Hey!"
Bellamy pushed his way through the opposite side of the crowd, his stolen guard jacket hanging open. "Enough, Murphy." His eyes immediately darted past Wells, locking onto his sister. He saw the way she was leaning heavily on her good leg, the thick, blood-stained bandage wrapped around her thigh, and Aleksander's oversized jacket draped over her shoulders.
Bellamy rushed forward, his face pale. "Octavia. Are you all right?"
"Yeah," Octavia answered quietly, pulling the jacket a little tighter around herself.
Bellamy looked at the exhausted, terrified faces of the search party. "Where's the food?"
Finn stepped forward, his carefree attitude entirely gone. "We didn't make it to Mount Weather."
"What the hell happened out there?" Bellamy demanded, his protective instincts flaring into anger.
"We were attacked," Clarke said, her voice shaking slightly as she fought to maintain her composure.
Wells frowned, looking around the brush. "Attacked? By what?"
"Not what. Who," Finn corrected grimly. "It turns out, when the last man from the ground died on the Ark, he wasn't the last Grounder."
A ripple of panicked murmurs swept through the hundred delinquents.
"It's true," Clarke said, raising her voice so the entire camp could hear her. "Everything we thought we knew about the ground is wrong. There are people here, survivors. The good news is, that means we can survive. Radiation won't kill us."
"Yeah, the bad news is the Grounders will," Finn muttered.
Wells looked at the group, suddenly realizing someone was missing. "Where's the kid with the goggles?"
"Jasper was hit. They took him," Clarke said, her voice dropping. But as she looked at Wells, her eyes snagged on his bare wrist. The heavy metal biometric band was gone. "Where is your wristband?"
Wells glared at the boy dusting himself off in the dirt. "Ask him."
Clarke whipped around to face Murphy. "How many?"
Murphy offered a smug, unapologetic smirk. "Twenty-four and counting."
"You idiots," Clarke breathed, the sheer weight of the impending disaster crashing down on her. She turned to the crowd, her voice echoing off the metal hull of the dropship. "Life support on the Ark is failing. That's why they brought us down here. They need to know the ground is survivable again, and we need their help against whoever is out there. If you take off your wristbands, you're not just killing them. You're killing us!"
For a second, the camp was dead silent. The revelation that the Ark was dying paralyzed them.
But Bellamy saw his absolute control slipping away. If the Ark came down, he was a dead man. He stepped up onto a rusted metal crate, positioning himself above the crowd.
"We're stronger than you think!" Bellamy yelled, his deep voice easily cutting through the panic. He pointed an accusatory finger at Clarke. "Don't listen to her. She's one of the privileged. If they come down, she'll have it good. How many of you can say the same? We can take care of ourselves! That wristband on your arm? It makes you a prisoner. We are not prisoners anymore! They say they'll forgive your crimes. I say you're not criminals! You're fighters, survivors! The Grounders should worry about us!"
"Yeah! Yeah!" The delinquents erupted, their fear instantly weaponized into rebellious fury. They cheered, the clamoring growing louder as Bellamy fueled their hatred for the people who had locked them up.
"That is, without a doubt, the most spectacularly stupid logic I have ever heard."
Aleksander's voice wasn't a yell. It was a cold, perfectly modulated statement that somehow sliced right through the roaring crowd. He stepped forward from the shadows of the tree line, his presence immediately causing the cheering teenagers to instinctively take a step back. They all remembered what he had done to Murphy on day one.
Aleksander stopped a few feet from Bellamy, staring dead into the older boy's eyes.
"You think calling yourselves 'survivors' magically makes you immune to a coordinated, indigenous military force?"
Aleksander asked, his tone dripping with clinical condescension. "They threw a spear with enough force to pin a human being to a tree trunk from fifty yards away while remaining completely undetected. They have the high ground, the numbers, and the terrain. You have sharp sticks, a single stolen sidearm, and a mob of malnourished teenagers."
Bellamy's jaw clenched, his authority challenged directly in front of his army.
"If the Ark thinks we're dead, they don't come down," Aleksander continued, taking one slow, deliberate step closer. "If they don't come down, they don't bring the dropships, the heavy munitions, the reinforced steel, or the medical supplies. You want to fight a war against unseen assassins with zero supply lines? You aren't a leader, Bellamy. You're a suicide risk."
The camp went dead quiet again. The cold, brutal reality of Aleksander's words stripped away the fantasy Bellamy had just spun for them.
Humiliated and sensing the shift in the crowd, Bellamy's hand dropped instinctively to his hip. His fingers brushed the grip of the stolen guard's pistol holstered at his side. He knew his chances in a hand-to-hand fight against Aleksander were terrifyingly low, but the gun was the ultimate equalizer.
Aleksander didn't flinch. He didn't even shift his stance. He just stared at Bellamy, an ancient, lethal stillness washing over him. Deep beneath his glamoured brown eyes, the violent green of the Fey flared, daring the older boy to draw the weapon.
"Bellamy, don't!"
Octavia shoved her way through the tension, instantly stepping directly between them. She put her hand firmly over her brother's hand, forcing his fingers away from the gun.
"O, step aside," Bellamy warned, his eyes never leaving Aleksander.
"No," Octavia fired back, her voice fiercely protective. She looked at Aleksander, remembering the impossible, healing warmth of his hands in the dark, and then looked back at her brother. "He saved my life at the river today, Bell. He's the only reason I'm standing here. And he's right. We have no idea what we're up against out there."
Bellamy stared at his sister, his anger warring with his desperation to protect her. Slowly, reluctantly, he took his hand off the gun, stepping down from the crate. He shot Aleksander a look of pure venom, but he backed down.
The heavy, suffocating tension in the camp finally broke.
Monty, looking pale and completely overwhelmed by the reality of the Grounders, stepped toward the center of the group. "What do we do now?"
Clarke stepped up beside Aleksander, her authority fully restored by his brutal dismantling of Bellamy's rebellion. She looked out at the terrified faces of the hundred.
"Now," Clarke said firmly, "we go after Jasper."