Chapter 8: Bridge Politics - Part 3
POV: Alec Morgan
Twenty-four hours after the bridge explosion, I should have been a mass of infected puncture wounds requiring bed rest and antibiotics. Instead, I woke to find my back covered in neat pink scars that looked weeks old rather than hours. The regeneration had worked faster than ever before, fueled by the severity of the injuries and my body's desperate need to survive.
Which presented a problem, because Clarke had specifically requested to examine my wounds this morning.
"Let me see how those punctures are healing," she said, approaching with medical supplies and the kind of professional determination that brooked no argument.
"They're fine," I said quickly, pulling my shirt tighter around my shoulders. "Barely even sore anymore."
"That's not medically possible," she replied with the patience of someone explaining basic physics to a child. "Deep puncture wounds don't stop being sore after eighteen hours. Let me look."
I could have refused. Could have invented some excuse about modesty or discomfort. But too much resistance would only increase suspicion, and I was already operating under more scrutiny than I could safely handle.
Reluctantly, I pulled off my shirt and turned my back to her.
The silence stretched long enough that I knew she was seeing exactly what I'd feared she would see. Where yesterday there had been seventeen distinct puncture wounds requiring cleaning and stitching, today there were only faint pink lines marking where the injuries had been.
"This is impossible," she said finally, her voice tight with confusion and growing alarm.
"Good genetics?" I suggested weakly. "My mom always said our family healed fast."
"Your mother said a lot of convenient things," Clarke observed, her tone shifting from medical to interrogative. "Fast healing doesn't explain tissue regeneration that violates basic human biology."
She moved around to face me, her eyes sharp with the kind of analytical intelligence that had gotten her father executed for asking inconvenient questions. "These wounds were deep enough to require surgical intervention yesterday. Today they look like old scars. That doesn't happen, Alec. People don't heal like that."
"Maybe you overestimated how bad they were," I said, grasping for any explanation that might deflect her suspicion. "Lots of blood, chaotic situation, easy to misjudge severity."
"I counted seventeen distinct punctures," she said flatly. "Three deep enough to expose bone, five that should have required surgery to prevent internal bleeding. I documented them specifically because they were so severe."
"Think. Think of something. Anything."
"Well, I feel fine now," I said with forced lightness. "Isn't that what matters?"
But Clarke wasn't laughing, and her expression was transitioning from confused to genuinely worried. "Alec, what aren't you telling us? Because this level of regeneration isn't normal. It's not even possible without significant medical intervention."
The question hung between us like a blade. She was asking for truth I couldn't give without revealing transmigration, powers, and future knowledge that would mark me as something beyond human comprehension. But continuing to lie was becoming increasingly difficult when the physical evidence contradicted every explanation I offered.
"I don't know what to tell you," I said, which was as close to honesty as I could safely manage. "I've always healed pretty fast. Maybe it's genetic. Maybe it's diet. Maybe I just got lucky with how the wounds looked worse than they actually were."
Clarke studied me for a long moment, clearly unconvinced but unable to force answers I wouldn't give. "We're going to keep an eye on this," she said finally. "If you have some kind of medical condition that affects healing, we need to understand it."
POV: Raven
From her position by the radio equipment, Raven had been watching the medical examination with growing fascination. She'd seen Alec's injuries yesterday—had helped carry him back to camp, had seen the blood loss and trauma that should have required days of recovery. This morning, he was moving like nothing had happened.
It was the latest in a series of impossibilities that surrounded the farm boy who seemed to know more than he should about everything from mechanical engineering to tactical assessment. Pattern recognition was one of Raven's strengths, and the patterns she was seeing didn't add up to normal human capabilities.
After Clarke finished her examination and moved away with visible frustration, Raven approached Alec near the radio setup where he'd been making himself useful by organizing components with surprising efficiency.
"You're not just a farm boy, are you?" she said quietly, her voice soft but insistent.
He looked up from the circuit boards he'd been sorting, and she caught a flash of something—vulnerability, maybe, or desperate hope—before his usual deflection clicked into place.
"Would you believe really good survival instincts?" he asked with that self-deprecating grin she was learning to recognize as his default defense mechanism.
"No," she said simply. "I wouldn't."
The directness seemed to catch him off guard. He set down the component he'd been holding and really looked at her—not the casual glance of someone making conversation, but the intense focus of someone trying to read intentions and assess threats.
"What do you want me to say?" he asked, and there was something raw in his voice that made her chest tighten.
"The truth would be nice," she replied. "But I'll settle for you not insulting my intelligence with stories about agricultural training and lucky guesses."
They stared at each other for a long moment, and she could see him wrestling with something—wanting to trust her, maybe, but held back by fears she couldn't identify. Finally, he looked away.
"I can't," he said quietly. "I wish I could, but I can't."
"Can't or won't?"
"Does it matter?"
She considered the question seriously. "Maybe not. But here's what I know—you move like someone with combat training despite claiming to be civilian. You understand technology that should be outside your experience. You make tactical assessments that save lives. You heal from injuries that should kill you. And every time someone asks how, you deflect with jokes and fake modesty."
He was very still now, listening with the kind of attention that suggested her words were hitting closer to truth than he was comfortable with.
"I also know," she continued, "that every time you've used whatever abilities you're hiding, it's been to protect people. To save lives. To keep us alive when we should have died."
"And?" he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
"And maybe that matters more than whatever secrets you're carrying." She reached out and touched his hand briefly. "You'll tell me when you're ready. Or you won't, and I'll figure it out anyway. But until then, I'm not going anywhere."
The relief that flooded his face was so intense it was painful to witness. Like someone who'd been holding his breath for days finally being allowed to exhale.
"Thank you," he said, and she heard everything he couldn't say in those two words.
"Don't thank me yet," she warned. "Because I'm going to keep watching, and I'm going to keep asking questions, and eventually I'm going to understand what you are."
"What I am?"
"Whatever it is that makes you different from the rest of us," she clarified. "Whatever it is that scares you so much you'd rather people think you're lucky than competent."
POV: Alec Morgan
Later that evening, as camp settled into its nightly routine of guards and maintenance, Bellamy found me sharpening spear points near the fire. The task gave my hands something to do while my mind processed the day's conversations and growing complications.
"Walk with me," he said, and it wasn't really a request.
We moved away from camp's light and noise, following a game trail that led toward the stream. When we were far enough from camp that our voices wouldn't carry, Bellamy stopped and turned to face me.
"You knew that bridge was a trap," he said without preamble. "You positioned yourself exactly where the explosion would be strongest. You moved before it happened, like you could see the future."
I started to deflect with another joke, but the expression on his face stopped me. This wasn't casual suspicion anymore. This was a direct confrontation that would determine whether he saw me as ally or threat.
"I had a bad feeling," I said carefully.
"Bullshit." His voice was dangerously calm. "I've seen bad feelings. This was something else. You knew what was coming, when it was coming, and exactly how to position yourself to minimize casualties."
"Maybe I just—"
"Who the hell are you really?" he interrupted. "Because Alec Morgan, farm boy from Agricultural Station, doesn't have the tactical knowledge to predict Grounder ambush tactics. Doesn't have the medical expertise to identify natural antibiotics. Doesn't have the technical skills to improve our equipment. And he sure as hell doesn't heal from fatal injuries in eighteen hours."
The catalog of evidence was more complete than I'd realized. He'd been watching, cataloguing, building a case that painted me as something far from human. And worst of all, he was right about everything.
"I'm someone trying to keep people alive," I said, offering the only truth I could safely give. "That's all you need to know."
"No," Bellamy said, stepping closer. "It's not. Because people who hide that much usually have reasons. And those reasons usually involve danger for everyone around them."
His jaw was tight with the kind of controlled anger that preceded violence. I could see him calculating whether I represented a threat that needed elimination, weighing my usefulness against my unpredictability.
"I'm not dangerous," I said quietly. "Not to you. Not to anyone in camp."
"Prove it," he demanded. "Give me one honest answer about what you are, what you can do, and why you're hiding it. One truth, or we're having a much harder conversation."
"He means it. He'll force a confrontation if I don't give him something."
The moment stretched between us like a tightrope over an abyss. I could feel the weight of his suspicion, the threat implicit in his stance, the knowledge that my answer would determine whether he saw me as family or enemy going forward.
"I can heal from injuries that would kill normal people," I said finally. "I can sense danger before it manifests. And I know things about survival that I shouldn't know. I don't understand why, I don't know how to control it, and I've spent my whole life hiding it because people who are different get dissected or weaponized."
The admission hung in the air between us, more truth than I'd given anyone since arriving on Earth. Bellamy studied my face, searching for deception or threat, weighing my words against my actions.
"Anything else?" he asked.
"Nothing that would hurt the people I care about," I said, and let him hear the sincerity in my voice.
He was quiet for a long moment, processing implications and recalculating threat assessments. When he finally spoke, his tone had shifted from confrontational to something approaching acceptance.
"I'm watching you," he said. "One slip, one sign that you're not what you claim to be, and we're having a much harder conversation."
"I understand."
"Good." He turned to walk back toward camp, then paused. "For what it's worth, whatever you are, you fight for us. You take hits for us. That counts for something."
"Thanks."
"Don't thank me yet," he said, echoing Raven's warning. "Because if I find out you're lying about being harmless, I'll put you down myself."
The threat was delivered without heat, a simple statement of fact that carried the weight of absolute certainty. If I became a danger to his people, Bellamy Blake would kill me without hesitation.
As I watched him disappear back toward camp, I realized I'd crossed another line. First Raven with her intuitive acceptance, now Bellamy with his pragmatic assessment. My secrets were becoming known quantities, shared truths that bound me closer to these people while simultaneously making me more vulnerable.
The question was whether the bonds forming were strong enough to survive the revelations still to come.
Because I knew things were about to get much worse, and the hardest tests of loyalty and trust were still ahead of us.