“Careful,” Wells called out as he watched one of the younger boys reach toward the fire. “Use the stick.”
“I got it,” he said, carefully removing the corn from the red-hot stones Wells had piled on top of the flames, the way Sasha had told him to.
The corn had, quite literally, been a lifesaver. Now instead of furtive whispers and weary complaints, the camp was filled with the sound of crackling flames and reinvigorated chatter. Everyone sat around the fire, gnawing at the strange but welcome food.
After returning with as much as they could carry, Wells and Sasha had grabbed two empty water containers and headed back to the orchard for more. By the time they’d staggered back, smiling and weary from their efforts, Wells had almost forgotten that Sasha was their prisoner. He’d felt exceedingly awkward when, after thanking her for her help, he’d had to sneak her back to the infirmary cabin. Luckily, Clarke had been gone, and the sick people asleep, so no one saw him apologizing to Sasha as he retied her hands.
You caught her spying on you, he reminded himself as he watched a group of girls challenge some Walden boys to a corncob-throwing contest. Wells started to protest—Sasha had warned them not to leave the cobs in the clearing, lest they attract unwelcome animal visitors—but he swallowed the words. He’d have an easier time sneaking some food to Sasha if he didn’t make a scene.
Wells gingerly plucked a few cobs from the embers, stretching out his shirt so he could carry them without burning his hands, then headed back to the infirmary cabin.
“Hey,” he whispered as he moved quietly toward her cot. “I brought you one.” He handed her one of the corncobs, which had cooled enough to touch, then placed the others next to Molly, Felix, and Tamsin so they’d have something to eat when they woke up. It was becoming hard to find volunteers to bring food and water to the sick people. Rumors about their illness were spreading, and now it was rare for anyone besides Clarke, Wells, Bellamy, Priya, and Eric to set foot inside the infirmary cabin.
“Thanks,” Sasha said, shooting a wary glance toward the door before taking a small bite of the corn.
“How is it?” Wells asked, returning to sit on the edge of her cot. “Better than the protein paste?”
She smiled. “Yes, definitely better. Although still pretty bland. Why didn’t you season them with those pepper leaves like I told you?”
“I figured the corn was suspicious enough. Revealing some fancy cooking tricks might’ve caused more trouble than it was worth.”
He expected her to tease him about his culinary skills, but instead her face grew serious. “They really don’t trust me, do they?” There was an edge to her voice as she shifted on the cot. “What can I do to convince you all that I had nothing to do with the attacks?”
“It’ll just take some time,” Wells said, though he still wasn’t entirely sure whether he believed her. He knew Sasha was kind and rational, but that certainly didn’t mean her people—her father—weren’t capable of violence. If, somehow, the Colony were threatened by some hitherto unimagined enemy, Wells’s father wouldn’t have thought twice before launching an attack.
The door opened and Kendall walked in. Wells jumped to his feet as Kendall stared at them, an inscrutable look on her face. “Sorry to disturb you,” she said, glancing between Wells and Sasha. “I was just coming to take a quick nap. I didn’t get much sleep last night, obviously.”
“It’s fine,” Wells said. He gestured toward the empty cots. “There’s plenty of room.” Apparently, Kendall wasn’t worried about catching the mysterious illness.
“No, it’s okay. I’ll try one of the other cabins.” She gave Wells one more lingering look before she turned around and walked back into the clearing.
“See? No one even wants to be in the same room as me. They all think I’m a murderer.”
Wells glanced over at Tamsin, whose heavily bandaged leg might as well have been emblazoned with a warning about the Earthborns. To say nothing of the newly dug grave in the cemetery. Until Sasha could prove that there really was a rogue band of Earthborns, people who had nothing to do with her, it’d be impossible for the hundred to see her as anything but a threat. “Do you want to go for a walk?” he said suddenly. “It’s silly for you to be locked in here all day.”
Sasha gave him a long, searching look before raising her bound hands from her lap. “Okay. But no more handcuffs. You know I’m not going anywhere.”
Wells untied her and then, while Sasha rearranged her fur wrap, went over to check on Molly. “Hey,” he whispered, crouching next to her cot. “How are you feeling?” She murmured something but didn’t open her eyes. “Molly?” With a sigh, Wells pulled her blanket up over her thin shoulders, then tucked a strand of sweat-dampened hair behind her ear. “I’ll be back soon,” he said quietly.
Wells peeked into the clearing. Most of the camp was still gathered around the fire, or putting the finishing touches on the new roof. If they hurried, they’d be able to leave unseen. Wells chose not to dwell on the fact that, for the second time that day, he was doing something secret, hiding his actions from the rest of the group. He turned around to gesture to Sasha, and then they quickly darted outside and across the tree line.
Sasha led Wells in a different direction this time, one he hadn’t taken before. Unlike Bellamy, he hadn’t spent a great deal of time in the woods, and was only familiar with the path they usually took to fetch water from the stream. “Watch out,” Sasha called over her shoulder. “It gets pretty steep here.”
Steep was a bit of an understatement. The ground suddenly fell away, and Wells was forced to creep down sideways, grabbing on to the thin, flexible trees that grew out of the hillside to keep himself from tumbling down. The incline was so sharp that some of their roots grew out into the air instead of down into the ground.
Sasha didn’t seem bothered by the grade. She’d barely slowed down and was now several meters ahead of Wells. She’d extended her arms to the side, using her outstretched fingers for balance, looking like the birds he’d seen swooping above the clearing.
A loud crack sounded from behind. Startled, Wells whipped his head around. The movement was enough to send his feet flying out from under him, and he fell, sliding down the slick grass. He tried to dig his fingers into the ground to slow himself down, but he kept gaining speed until something jerked him to a stop. Breathless, he looked up to see Sasha grinning at him as she held the collar of his jacket. “You’re going to have to wait a few months for sledding,” she said as she helped pull him to his feet.
“Sledding?” Wells repeated as he brushed off the back of his pants and tried not to think about how much of an idiot he must’ve looked. “You mean there’s going to be snow?”
“If you’re still alive that long,” Sasha said, grabbing Wells’s elbow as he slipped again.
“If I die before seeing snow, it’ll be because I have one of your friends’ arrows in my back. Not because I keep falling on my ass.”
“How many times do I have to explain this? Those people are most definitely not my friends.”
“Yeah, but don’t you know them well enough to ask them to stop trying to kill us?” he replied, searching her face for a hint of whatever she was hiding from him.
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” she said, pulling him along the slope.
Wells gestured downward. “You seem to like complicated.”
She rolled her eyes. “Trust me, space boy. This will be worth it.”
When they were almost at the bottom, Wells pushed off the hill to jump down the last few meters. But instead of landing on grass, his feet struck something hard. The impact was enough to send a jolt of pain shooting up his legs, though fortunately, he managed to stay upright this time. He winced, but when he glanced down, surprise chased away all thoughts of discomfort.
The ground wasn’t grass or dirt. It was rock. He bent down and brushed his fingers along the rough gray surface. No, not rock—this was a road. Wells jumped back and looked from side to side, half expecting to hear the rumble of an engine.
“Are you okay?” Sasha asked, coming to stand next to him. Wells nodded, unsure how to explain. When he’d found Clarke stranded in the ruins of the church, he’d been too terrified to focus on anything besides getting her out. Now he leaned over to study the cement, the way its fissures cracked and grew, small plants growing in the gaps.
On the Colony, it had been easy to think about the Cataclysm in the abstract sense. He knew how many people had died when it’d happened, how many metric tons of toxins had been released into the air and so on. But now, he thought about the people who’d driven, ran, or maybe even crawled down this road in a desperate attempt to escape the bombs. How many people had died in this very spot as the earth shook and the sky filled with smoke?
“It’s just over here,” Sasha said, placing her hand on his shoulder. “Follow me.”
“What’s just over there?” he asked, turning his head from side to side. The air felt different here than it did in the clearing, heavy with memories that made Wells shiver.
“You’ll see.”
They walked in silence for a few minutes. With each step, Wells’s heart began to beat a little faster. “You have to promise me you won’t tell anyone about this,” Sasha said. Her voice grew quiet, and she glanced nervously over her shoulder.
Wells hesitated. He’d learned the hard way what happened when you made promises you couldn’t keep. “You can trust me,” he said finally.
Sasha stared at him for a moment, then nodded. As they turned around a bend in the road, Wells’s skin began to tingle, his nerves buzzing with energy as his body braced for whatever awaited them.
But when the road straightened out again, there was nothing. Only more cracked pavement veined with plants.
“There,” Sasha said, pointing toward the trees that bordered the side of the road. “Do you see it?”
Wells started to shake his head, then froze as a geometric outline took shape among the tangle of branches.
It was a house.
“Oh my god,” Wells whispered as he took a few steps forward. “This is impossible. I thought there was nothing left!”
“There’s not much. But these mountains protected a few structures from the blasts. Most of the people around here survived the bombs, but died later from starvation or radiation poisoning.”
As they got closer, Wells saw that the house was made of stone, which he supposed had a better chance of weathering the destruction, although much of the right side had collapsed.
There was no glass left in any of the windows, and thick vines covered a large portion of the surviving walls. There was something almost predatory about the way they wrapped up the sides, snaking through the gaping windows and up out of what had once been a chimney, as if the earth were trying to erase all evidence of human life.
“Can we go inside?” Wells asked when he realized he’d been staring at the house in shocked silence.
“No. I think it’ll be more fun to stand here all day and watch you gaping like a fish.”
“Cut me some slack. This is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Sasha blinked at him incredulously. “You lived in space. You’ve seen Mars!”
He grinned. “You have to use a telescope to see Mars, and even then it just looks like a red dot. Now come on. Are we going inside or what?”
They walked toward the side of the house farthest from the collapsed wall, where there was a window about two meters from the ground with an inviting ledge beneath it. Wells watched as Sasha climbed up onto the ledge with ease, then lowered herself through the window, disappearing into the darkness inside.
“You coming?” she called back to him.
He grinned again and climbed through the window, landing with a soft thud that jolted all other thoughts from his mind. He was standing in a house, an actual home, where people had lived before the Cataclysm.
He turned his head from side to side. It seemed like they were in what had once been a kitchen. The floor was covered in cracked yellow and white tiles, and there were white cabinets hanging slightly askew over a deep sink, the largest Wells had ever seen. The only light came from the broken window, which, filtered through the surrounding trees, gave the room a faint, greenish glow, as if he were looking at an old photograph. But this was undeniably real. He took a few steps forward and gingerly ran his finger along the counter, which was covered in generations of dust. He reached up, and even more gently, opened one of the cabinets.
There were stacks of plates and bowls inside. Although they’d slid to the side when the cabinet came loose, it was clear they’d been arranged with care. Some seemed to belong to a set, others were one of a kind. Wells removed a plate from the top of the pile. This one had an illustration on it, though it looked like it’d been done by a child. There were four stick figures with oversize, smiling faces, standing in a line holding one another’s misshapen hands. I LOV ARE FAMLEE was printed in wobbly letters above their heads. Wells replaced the plate carefully and turned to see Sasha staring at him out of the silent, dusty gloom.
“It happened a long time ago,” she said quietly.
Wells nodded. The words I know formed in his brain but got lost somewhere on the way to his mouth. His eyes began to prickle and he turned away quickly. Eight billion. That’s how many people had died during the Cataclysm. It’d always seemed as abstract as any huge figure, like the age of Earth, or the number of stars in the galaxy. Yet now, he’d give anything to know that the people who’d eaten dinner together in this kitchen, with those plates, had somehow made it off the burning planet.
“Wells, come look at this.” He turned and saw Sasha kneeling next to a pile of rubble on the far side of the room, where the wall had caved in. She was brushing dust and bits of debris off something on the floor.
He walked over and crouched down next to her. “What is it?” he asked as Sasha pulled at what looked like a clasp. “Careful,” he warned, remembering Clarke’s snake.
“It’s a suitcase,” Sasha said, her voice a mix of surprise and something else—apprehension? Fear?
The case fell open, sending a new cloud of dust into the air, and they both leaned forward for a better look. There were only a few items inside. Three small faded shirts that Wells examined one at a time, carefully replacing each exactly as he’d found them. There was also a book. Most of the pages had rotted away, but enough remained for Wells to tell it was about a boy named Charlie. He hesitated before putting it back inside the suitcase. He would’ve loved to examine it in the sunlight, but for some reason, it didn’t seem right to take anything away from the house.
The only other recognizable item was a small stuffed bear. Its fur had probably been yellow at one point, though it was hard to tell with all the dust. Sasha picked it up and stared at it for a moment before pressing a finger against his black nose. “Poor bear,” she said with a smile, although she couldn’t quite keep her voice from catching.
“It’s just so sad,” Wells said, running his finger along one of the T-shirts. “If they had left sooner, maybe they would’ve made it out in time.”
“Where were they supposed to go?” Sasha asked, shooting him a look as she rubbed dust off one of the bear’s paws. “Do you have any idea how much it cost to get to one of the launch sites during the Forsakening? The people who lived around here didn’t have that kind of money.”
“That’s not how it worked,” Wells said, an edge creeping into his voice. He took a deep breath to regain his composure. It felt terribly wrong to shout in a place like this. “People didn’t have to pay to go on the ship.”
“No? Then how were the Colonists selected?”
“They came from the neutral nations,” Wells said, suddenly feeling like he was back in a primary tutorial. “The ones that weren’t greedy or foolish enough to get caught in nuclear war.”
The look Sasha gave him was unlike anything he ever saw on his tutors’ faces, even when he was wrong. They never stared at him with a mixture of pity and scorn. If anything, Sasha looked more like his father. “Then why does everyone on the ship speak English?” she asked quietly.
He didn’t have an answer for that. He’d spent his whole life imagining what it’d be like to see real Earth ruins, and now that he was here, thinking about all the lives that had been extinguished during the Cataclysm made it difficult to breathe.
“We should get back,” he said, rising to his feet and reaching out to help Sasha. She glanced at the suitcase for a long moment, then tucked the bear under her arm and took Wells’s hand.