[Dropship Camp — Day 1, Pre-Dawn]
The shovel was a panel of hull plating hammered flat with a rock, and it was garbage.
Cal drove it into the earth anyway. The ground resisted — root systems, packed clay, stones the size of his fist — and every strike sent a jolt up both arms. Blisters had opened on his right palm an hour ago. The left was close behind. He'd wrapped both hands in strips torn from a spare jumpsuit and kept digging.
A latrine. The most unglamorous, unsexy, absolutely critical piece of infrastructure a camp of a hundred people needed on Day One. By noon, kids would be relieving themselves wherever they wanted, and within three days the water source would be contaminated and the first cases of dysentery would follow. Cal had seen enough field sanitation manuals during his Army Reserve days to know that more soldiers died from bad water than bad aim.
He dug. Dawn was a gray suggestion on the horizon. Birds he couldn't identify called from the canopy. The air was cool and damp and tasted like living things.
The hum in his skull was louder this morning. Not painful — more insistent, like the nanomachines had spent the night running diagnostics and didn't like what they found. His body had metabolized both ration bars and most of a third during the night, and he was hungry again already. That was going to be a problem. A hundred teenagers sharing six hundred ration bars, and one of them needed to eat three times what anyone else did.
The trench was two feet deep and six feet long when boots crunched on gravel behind him.
Cal didn't turn. He'd heard the footsteps thirty paces out — heavier than most of the kids, deliberate, someone who walked like they were thinking about where to put each foot. Wells.
"You've been at this since before sunrise." Wells stopped at the edge of the trench. His voice was measured, careful, the voice of someone used to weighing every word because his father's enemies would use the careless ones.
"Needed doing." Cal drove the makeshift shovel in again. "Nobody else was going to."
A pause. Then Wells dropped into the trench beside him, picked up a flat piece of hull plating Cal had set aside, and started digging.
They worked in silence for twenty minutes. No conversation, no bonding monologue, just two pairs of hands moving dirt. Cal kept the pace and Wells matched it without complaint, which told Cal more about the kid than any dialogue could. Wells Jaha didn't need to be asked twice. He saw work and he did it.
"Water filter next," Cal said when the trench was deep enough. He pointed south. "There's a stream maybe a kilometer that way. We can't use it directly — no telling what's in the runoff. But if we build a gravity-fed filter between there and camp, we'll have potable water by tonight."
Wells leaned on his shovel. The expression Cal was learning to read — impressed tilting left, concerned staying dead center — landed somewhere between the two. "You know a lot about this."
"Studied some engineering manuals in the Skybox." True enough. He'd spent eight months reading everything the Ark's restricted archives contained about civil engineering, water treatment, structural design, and field medicine. The restricted access that had gotten Callum Mercer arrested was, in retrospect, the most useful crime a delinquent had ever committed.
"Engineering manuals that cover latrine construction?"
"Army field manuals, technically. The Ark kept some pre-war military archives." Also true. The lie was in the implication — that he'd learned all of this from reading, rather than from a previous life's worth of training and a 26-year-old brain running behind a 19-year-old face.
Wells accepted it with a nod. He didn't push. Filed the information, weighed it, and moved on. Cal appreciated that more than he'd expected.
---
By midmorning the filter was built.
Three layers of gravel, a charcoal bed made from the driest logs Cal could find burned down in a controlled fire, and a piece of dropship paneling hammered into a funnel shape that looked like it belonged in a modern art gallery curated by someone who despised art. But clear water dripped from the bottom, and when Cal held it to the light, no cloudiness. Drinkable.
He set up the ration storage next — inside the dropship's lower level, shaded, organized by calorie count. Crude, but it imposed order on the chaos of pried-open crates and scattered bars.
Clarke noticed. She was organizing the med kit on the dropship ramp, sorting bandages and antiseptic wipes into something resembling triage order, and she looked up when Cal walked past with an armload of ration bars.
"Did you build that water filter?"
"Gravity plus filtration medium. Not complicated."
Her eyes tracked him the way a doctor tracked a patient who was refusing to explain their symptoms. Curious. Slightly suspicious. "Where'd you learn—"
"The expedition." Cal redirected without breaking stride. "You're heading for Mount Weather today?"
The suspicion shifted to something sharper. "How do you know about Mount Weather?"
"Chancellor's briefing is in the wristband data. I read mine before everyone started ripping theirs off." Lie. Clean, practiced, delivered while organizing rations because eye contact during deception was a tell and Cal knew all his tells by now.
Clarke studied him for another beat, then turned back to the med kit. "We're leaving within the hour. Finn, Jasper, Monty, Octavia."
"Take a weapon."
"We don't have weapons."
"Take a sharp stick, then. Something." He set down the last ration bar and turned to face her. "You're walking into unknown territory with no intel, no communication, and no extraction plan. At least have something you can swing."
Her jaw tightened. The flash in her eyes was defensive, then reluctant, then practical. Clarke Griffin was a lot of things, but stupid wasn't one of them.
"Fine," she said. "A sharp stick."
---
Cal watched the expedition leave an hour later.
Five of them — Clarke, Finn, Jasper, Monty, Octavia — heading northwest toward the distant shape of Mount Weather. Jasper was grinning, goggles on his forehead, practically bouncing. Monty stayed close to him, quieter, the kind of loyal that didn't announce itself. Finn walked with his hands in his pockets like he was strolling to class. Octavia kept looking at the trees like she wanted to climb every single one.
Cal's stomach turned.
He knew what waited at the river. A Grounder spear, thrown from a position the group would never see, aimed at the first person to cross. In the show, that spear had punched through Jasper's chest and pinned him to a tree. Jasper had survived — barely — but the wound had nearly killed him and the rescue attempt had exposed the group to the Grounders for the first time.
Cal could go. Insert himself into the expedition, steer them around the crossing, prevent the spearing entirely. He ran the scenario in his head while pretending to sort wire from Crate Three. If he prevented the Grounder contact, the hundred would continue believing they were alone. They'd spread out, get comfortable, take risks. And the Grounders would still be watching, would still see them as invaders, and the first real contact would happen on worse terms, without the galvanizing fear that Jasper's spearing provided.
Sometimes the script needed to play.
His hands shook slightly as he coiled wire around a spool made from a ration bar wrapper. Jasper was going to get a spear through the chest today, and Cal was going to let it happen because the math said it was better for everyone in the long run.
The math didn't make it feel any less like choosing who bled.
---
Murphy found Wells at the water filter around noon.
Cal was thirty meters away, stripping insulation from wiring behind the dropship, when he heard the shove. Metal rang — someone hitting the filter housing — and Murphy's voice carried sharp and clear across the camp.
"Out of the way, Chancellor Junior."
Cal straightened. Through the gap between the dropship's landing struts, he could see Murphy leaning into Wells's space, one hand on the filter, posture broadcasting threat the way a dog broadcasts hackles. Two of Murphy's shadows lingered behind him — Mbege, arms crossed, and a kid Cal didn't recognize.
Wells hadn't moved. His weight was centered, hands at his sides, face expressionless. He'd absorbed worse than John Murphy on the Ark — his father was Chancellor, which made him a target from birth — but the isolation here was different. On the Ark, people hated him in whispers. Down here, the whispers had teeth.
"Filter's for everyone," Wells said. Even. Measured. Not backing up.
"Everything here is for everyone. That's the Chancellor's line, right? 'We share the burden. We share the sacrifice.' Your daddy shared my father right out an airlock."
Cal set down the wire and walked over. Not fast. Not aggressive. The energy of someone who had a task and needed extra hands.
"Murphy." He stopped three paces short. Enough distance to be non-threatening, close enough to be relevant. "I need those supply crates moved from the south wall to inside the ship. Rain's coming tonight and the rations get wet, we're eating mush for a week."
Murphy turned. The anger was still coiled in his shoulders, looking for a target. His eyes moved from Cal to Wells to the crates and back.
"I look like a pack mule to you?"
"You look like someone with two working arms standing around while there's work to do. Grab a crate or don't — makes no difference to me."
A beat. Something shifted behind Murphy's eyes — not softness, nothing close to that, but a flicker of surprise. Most people talked to Murphy in one of two registers: contempt or fear. Cal had used neither.
Murphy grabbed a crate. Hefted it with a grunt, started walking toward the dropship. Over his shoulder: "You owe me a ration bar."
"I'll add it to your tab."
Wells watched Murphy go. His expression gave away nothing, but the tension in his shoulders eased by a fraction. He looked at Cal.
"You didn't have to do that."
"Supply crates actually do need moving." Cal picked up the wire he'd dropped and started walking. "Rain tonight. Probably."
He didn't look back. Didn't need to. The quiet gratitude in Wells's voice was enough, and more importantly, Murphy had taken the crate. First time anyone had spoken to John Murphy without contempt, and he'd responded with work instead of a fist.
Small data point. Worth tracking.
---
Late afternoon. The light slanted gold through the canopy and the camp had settled into a rhythm — chaotic, disorganized, but a rhythm. Bellamy's people had established a perimeter of sorts, more territorial than tactical. The fire pit was permanent now, ringed with stones someone had carried from the ridge. Arguments broke out and resolved, mostly about wristbands and rations and who had to do what.
Cal was restringing one of the broken radios when the birds went.
A flock — twenty, thirty, he couldn't count — erupted from the eastern treeline, screaming into the sky in a dark, frantic cloud. Something had spooked them. Something large, moving fast, roughly in the direction where the expedition would be crossing the river.
His hands went still on the radio. The wire between his fingers trembled.
The camp didn't notice. Bellamy was holding court by the fire. Two kids were wrestling near the south wall. Someone was singing, badly, and someone else was yelling at them to stop.
Cal set the radio down and looked east. The birds were gone. The treeline was silent.
Jasper had just been hit.
He stared at the gap in the canopy where the flock had disappeared and counted his own heartbeats while the daylight bled toward dusk and the expedition did not come back.
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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:
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