[Dropship Interior — Day 3, 2:47 AM]
Wells asked better questions than he had any right to.
"Why route the secondary conduit through the lower junction instead of the upper? The upper path is shorter." He held the portable lamp steady, throwing a cone of white light across the exposed wire channels in the dropship wall. His free hand traced the circuit path Cal had mapped with charcoal marks.
Cal peeled insulation from a copper strand with his teeth — the wire stripper was garbage, dull and misaligned — and spat the rubber casing onto the floor. "Shorter isn't better if the upper junction shares a ground with the communications array. Run secondary power through it and you get crosstalk. Static on every channel."
"You're assuming the array is still functional."
"I'm assuming we'll want it functional eventually. Build it right now, fix it once. Build it wrong, fix it every time something trips."
Wells considered this. The lamp tilted slightly — his version of a nod, conceding the point without wasting words on agreement. Cal had mapped that tell over two nights of work: Wells didn't perform concession. He just moved on.
Behind them, Jasper's breathing had settled into a rhythm — still rough, still too shallow, but steadier than six hours ago. Monty had fallen asleep beside him, curled against the interior wall with one hand resting on Jasper's forearm, as though he could anchor his friend to the living world through contact alone.
Cal stripped another wire. His hands ached — the blisters from the latrine trench had hardened into calluses that split and reopened each time he gripped. The creation pain in his right palm had faded to a low-grade throb, manageable, but the hunger hadn't. Three ration bars today. His body wanted six. The nanomachine hum behind his eyes was persistent now, a background frequency he was learning to live with the way a person learned to live with tinnitus.
"Can I ask you something?" Wells set the lamp on a crossbeam, freeing both hands. His voice had shifted — still measured, but with an edge of genuine curiosity bleeding through the diplomatic register.
"You can ask."
"Why me?"
Cal didn't look up. Stripped another wire. "What do you mean?"
"Nobody in this camp wants to work with me. Clarke won't talk to me. Bellamy actively keeps his people away from me. And you — on Day One — you just started digging a trench and let me join." A pause. The careful kind, where Wells chose precision over speed. "I'm not ungrateful. But I'd like to understand the calculation."
Smart kid. Chancellor's son, raised in a world where every gesture carried political weight. Of course he'd analyze the transaction.
"No calculation." Cal connected two wire ends and twisted. "You showed up and helped. Most people here are tearing off wristbands and playing Lord of the Flies. You dug a latrine without being asked. That's worth more than popularity."
"That's pragmatism, not an answer."
Cal's hands paused. The copper between his fingers caught lamplight.
"Okay. Here's the answer." He looked at Wells directly. "You're the only other person in this camp thinking more than twelve hours ahead. Everyone else is reacting — to Bellamy, to the Grounders, to their own fear. You're planning. I need someone who plans."
Wells held his gaze. Something shifted behind his expression — not warmth, exactly, but recognition. One strategist identifying another.
"Fair enough," Wells said. He picked up the lamp and angled it toward the next junction box.
They worked.
---
Three-fifteen. Cal excused himself to check the water filter — a real task, since sediment was building in the charcoal layer — and used the trip to sweep the perimeter with his eyes.
Charlotte was there.
She stood between two tarp shelters, fifteen meters from the dropship ramp, small and still in the darkness. Her right hand hung at her side, fingers curled around something that caught moonlight in a thin metallic line. The knife. She hadn't abandoned it. She'd been carrying it for three days, sleeping with it, living with the weight of it in her grip.
Her eyes were fixed on the dropship door.
Cal adjusted the filter's charcoal layer, taking his time, letting his peripheral vision track her. Charlotte's body was rigid — not with fear but with purpose. Coiled. Ready. The blank expression from the fire pit was still there, the thousand-yard stare of a child who'd made a decision too big for a twelve-year-old brain to unmake.
But the dropship interior was lit. Wells was inside, visible through the door gap, alive and working and surrounded by other bodies. Monty. Jasper. The geometry of the moment denied her access — too many witnesses, too much light, too little opportunity.
Charlotte stood motionless for forty seconds. Then she turned and walked back to her sleeping spot, footsteps silent on the packed earth.
Cal exhaled. His heartbeat was doing something unpleasant against his ribs. The filter gurgled beneath his hands, sediment-brown water cycling through charcoal, and he watched a twelve-year-old girl disappear into the dark with murder still tucked in her fist.
One night down. He needed at least one more.
---
[Dropship Interior — Day 4, 1:20 AM]
Night two of the project. The water purification redesign was genuinely useful — Cal had moved past the pretense into real engineering, routing the filter system to draw from the stream via a gravity-fed pipe trench that Wells had improved with suggestions about pressure regulation. The kid knew fluid dynamics from Ark environmental systems, and his contributions made the design better than what Cal would've built alone.
Wells was mid-sentence when his voice trailed off and his chin dropped to his chest. Asleep. Mid-word, standing up, like someone had hit a switch.
Cal caught the lamp before it tipped and set it on the floor. He looked at Wells — seventeen, dark circles carved under his eyes, weight of an entire camp's hatred pulling his shoulders into a curve even in sleep. His father had floated people to save oxygen. The sins of the father, measured in the blood pressure of the son.
Cal shrugged off his own jacket — prison-issue, thin, barely functional — and draped it over Wells's shoulders. Wells shifted but didn't wake. His breathing evened.
In the silence, the dropship hummed. Not the nanomachine hum — something deeper, structural, a resonance transmitted through metal flooring from the ground below. Cal pressed his bare feet flat against the deck plate.
The vibration was there. Faint. Rhythmic. Like a pulse — not his pulse, not mechanical. Something geological. The ground itself, breathing through layers of soil and stone and compressed sediment, conducting frequency through the dropship's hull and into the bones of his feet.
Earthbending. Phase One. The absolute bottom of the power scale — not manipulation, not even sensation. Just... awareness. A whisper that the earth existed and that something in Cal's rewired nervous system was learning to listen.
It lasted four seconds. Then static filled his skull, the nanomachines protesting the expenditure, and the vibration vanished.
Cal stood very still for a long time, bare feet on cold metal, and waited for the pulse to return. It didn't.
He put his boots back on.
Near the doorway, a shadow moved. Cal's head turned — not fast enough to catch a face, but fast enough to register a small figure retreating from the gap between the ramp and the hull. Blonde hair. Knife-grip silhouette.
Charlotte, checking again.
The interior was lit. Wells was inside. The geometry held.
Cal sat down next to the junction box and resumed wiring with steady hands and a heartbeat that wouldn't settle. The murder window was closing. Charlotte's opportunity was shrinking with each night Wells spent sealed inside the dropship. But the impulse — the trauma, the rage, the dead-eyed need to strike at the nearest symbol of the man who'd killed her parents — wasn't shrinking with it.
He'd blocked the act. He hadn't touched the cause.
Morning broke gray and cold. Wells woke with Cal's jacket on his shoulders and a stiff neck, and didn't comment on either. They tested the water system — functional, clean output, pressure consistent — and Wells smiled for the first time since landing. Small, private, aimed at the clear water pooling in the catch basin.
"That's not nothing," Cal said.
Outside, Charlotte unzipped her sleeping bag and checked the knife beneath it. Still there. Still sharp. Her hands were steady as she tucked it back, zipped the bag closed, and walked to the ration line with a face that gave away nothing at all.
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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:
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