The next morning, the atmosphere inside the dropship was tense and focused. Monty Green was huddled over a makeshift workbench, surrounded by tangled wires and exposed circuitry, carefully working a rigged metal tool into the clasps of Clarke's wristband.
Clarke sat perfectly still, her jaw set in a hard, determined line. The conversation from the night before was still burning in her mind. Her mother had betrayed her father. Her mother was the reason he was dead. And right now, Clarke wanted Abby Griffin to feel a fraction of the devastating loss that had been inflicted upon her.
With a sharp, metallic click, the heavy locking mechanism released.
"Yes!" Monty cheered, pulling the band cleanly off her arm. He held the blinking device up with a victorious grin. "I did it. It's still operational."
Clarke immediately rubbed her raw, bruised wrist, feeling a sudden, strange weightlessness without the metal cuff. She looked up, only to find Aleksander standing near the dropship ladder. His arms were crossed over his chest, and his dark, calculating eyes were fixed entirely on her. He saw right through the tactical excuse.
"What?" Clarke deflected, her tone defensive. "Monty needed a working wristband."
Aleksander's expression remained perfectly neutral, though his voice carried a sharp, knowing edge. "And this is your way of punishing your mother."
Clarke's eyes flashed with a mix of guilt and lingering anger. "Look, they're running out of air, and we need their help," she justified, her voice rising slightly. "My mother thinking I'm dead is only temporary."
Aleksander didn't argue. He simply held her gaze, silently reminding her that acting on raw, vengeful emotion was a dangerous game, even if it yielded a tactical advantage.
Monty, completely oblivious to the heavy, underlying psychological war between them, was already eagerly plugging the wristband into his rigged console.
"Not if I can't patch it through the dropship mainframe," Monty muttered, his fingers flying over the salvaged keyboard. His eyes lit up with absolute determination. "I can do it. We'll be talking to The Ark by nightfall."
Earth Monitoring Station, The Ark
Miles above the toxic clouds of Earth, the sterile, cold silence of the monitoring room was suddenly shattered by a harsh, piercing alarm.
On the massive digital wall map tracking the hundred delinquents, a single icon began to flash violently red.
Dr. Abby Griffin froze. Her heart slammed against her ribs as she looked up from her datapad. The flashing icon wasn't just a number. It was a name.
Clarke Griffin - Status: TERMINATED.
"No!" Abby gasped, dropping her datapad. It clattered against the metal floor as she scrambled frantically toward the console, her hands shaking as she pulled up the live feed. "No. No. Hell no. No. No. Th... this isn't right."
Jackson stepped up closely behind her, his face pale with pity and dread. He reached out, gently putting a hand on her shoulder. "Abby..."
"No," Abby denied instantly, violently pushing his hand away. She hit a series of keys on the keyboard, desperately trying to ping the dark signal.
"Abby," Jackson said softly, his voice breaking.
"Okay. It's not conclusive," Abby rambled rapidly, pacing back and forth in front of the dead screen. Her eyes were wide, brimming with terrified tears, completely refusing to accept the reality the screen was displaying. "Just because her wristband went out doesn't mean... okay. It's the first terminated signal in over a week. We can still assume that things are stabilizing on Earth. We should assume that."
She stopped pacing and turned to Jackson, her voice cracking as she clung to the very last shred of scientific hope she had left.
"I need an analysis of Clarke's vital signs for the past two days," Abby ordered, her voice trembling.
Jackson looked at her, his heart breaking for his mentor. He knew what a terminated signal meant. They all did. "Abby..."
"Just have it ready for me when I get back," Abby snapped, unable to hold his gaze. She turned on her heel and practically fled the monitoring station, desperate to outrun the suffocating realization that she had just sent her only daughter to the ground to die.
The metallic hum of Mecha Station was drowned out by the harsh clanking of tools and the frantic hiss of welding torches. Dr. Abby Griffin paced the narrow walkway, her eyes fixed on the battered escape pod sitting in the center of the bay. Her patience had eroded completely, replaced by a suffocating, cold dread.
She stepped up to the pod, looking down at the young mechanic who was buried waist-deep in the access panels.
"Raven," Abby said, her voice tight with thinly veiled panic. "I need this dropship repaired, and I need it done yesterday."
Raven Reyes slid out from under the console, wiping a streak of grease from her forehead with the back of a gloved hand. She was exhausted, running on fumes and sheer willpower.
"I'm working as fast as I can, Abigail," Raven shot back, her tone sharp but entirely focused. "But you asked me to rebuild a hundred-year-old rust bucket from spare parts without anyone on the Ark noticing. If I rush the pressure seals, we don't just fail to find Clarke—I die in the vacuum of space before I even hit the atmosphere. I need a little more time."
Abby closed her eyes, taking a shuddering breath. "Just... hurry, Raven. Please. I need to know my daughter is safe."
Down on the ground, the damp, heavy air of the dropship was thick with anticipation. The ambient glow of the jury-rigged electrical setup illuminated the faces of the everyone gathered.
Monty Green, covered in dirt and sweat, wiped his hands on his jacket. He had spent days cannibalizing the dropship's internal wiring, bypassing the fried communication array, and meticulously linking it to the biometric wristbands.
"That's it," Monty announced, stepping back from the central console with a tired but triumphant smile. "The bypass is stable. We've got enough juice routed from the solar panels to punch a signal straight through the atmosphere to the Ark."
He turned to his best friend, holding out a pair of stripped copper wires acting as the final bridge to the battery array. "Jasper. You want the honors?"
Jasper grinned, his usual nervous energy replaced by pure excitement. "Are you kidding? We're about to be the guys who saved everyone."
He stepped up, grabbing the wires. "Here goes nothing. Contacting the mothership in three... two... one."
Jasper jammed the connections together.
For a fraction of a second, the dropship console lit up like a Christmas tree. A low, powerful hum vibrated through the metal floor, and the screens flickered to life. A cheer started to rise in the room—
SNAP.
A sharp, violent crack of electricity echoed through the confined space. The console sparked violently, shooting a shower of sparks that forced Jasper and Monty to jump back. At the exact same moment, every single wristband worn by the teens in the room beeped loudly, flashed a bright, angry red, and simultaneously died. The biometric lights faded to a dull, lifeless grey.
The cheering stopped instantly. The dropship plunged back into dim, heavy silence.
"No..." Monty whispered, his eyes wide with horror as he rushed back to the smoking console. "No, no, no. The surge... it cascaded back through the closed loop. The wristbands. They're all gone."
In the dim, sterile environment of the Earth Monitoring Station, Jackson was nursing a cup of synthetic coffee, his eyes bleary from staring at the biometric monitors for hours on end. The screen displayed the vital signs of the 100—a chaotic, constantly shifting graph of heart rates and body temperatures.
Suddenly, the screen glitched.
Jackson leaned forward, blinking rapidly. The cascading green lines on the primary monitor spiked violently for a microsecond before dropping flat. A sharp, continuous tone flatlined across the speakers.
One by one, the glowing dots representing the kids on Earth turned red, then vanished entirely from the grid.
"No," Jackson breathed, dropping his coffee cup. It shattered on the metal floor, but he didn't even flinch. He scrambled over to the console, frantically typing commands to reboot the sensors, hoping it was a localized system failure.
Nothing. The board was completely dark.
Every single wristband had just terminated at the exact same moment. To the Ark, it looked like all the remaining children on Earth had just died simultaneously.
Back in the dropship, panic was beginning to set in. Jasper was holding his fried wristband, looking at Monty in disbelief, while the others began shouting over each other.
Standing near the heavy metal doors of the dropship, cloaked in the shadows, Aleksander watched the chaos unfold. He didn't flinch when the console sparked, and he didn't join in the panicked shouting.
His eyes were fixed on the smoking remains of Monty's communication array, his mind already calculating the variables of the failure. Monty was a genius; his math was flawless. The electrical loop shouldn't have surged back unless it hit an impenetrable, localized wall of resistance that forcefully bounced the signal back at ten times the strength.
"I knew it," Aleksander muttered under his breath.
No one heard him over the shouting, but Aleksander had already connected the dots. The surge wasn't a mechanical failure on Monty's part. It was an external, highly advanced countermeasure. The signal had hit a localized electromagnetic jamming field covering this entire sector of the forest.
Whoever else was down here—whether it was the mountain they had been trying to reach or some other hidden faction—they possessed advanced, functioning technology. And they had just made damn sure the 100 couldn't call home.