[Dropship Camp — Day 2, Dusk]
Octavia came through the south treeline at a dead sprint, blood on her hands and someone else's scream still raw in her throat.
"Help! Somebody help — he's been hit, he's—"
The camp broke open. Bellamy reached her first, grabbing her shoulders, and she fought him off — "Not me, Jasper, they hit Jasper, we need—"
Behind her, Finn and Monty emerged from the trees carrying a makeshift stretcher built from branches and a jacket. On it, Jasper Jordan was gray-faced and very still. A dark stain spread across his chest from a wound that Cal couldn't see clearly in the failing light but didn't need to. Spear wound. Through the chest. The same wound he'd watched play out on a screen in another lifetime, except on a screen the blood had been prop syrup and the screaming had come through speakers.
Clarke ran from the dropship, med kit in hand. "Get him inside. Get him inside now."
The stretcher went up the ramp. Cal followed the crowd but stopped at the base, giving Clarke's team room to work. Monty's hands were shaking so badly he couldn't hold the stretcher steady. Finn's jaw was locked, eyes flat — the look of someone processing violence for the first time.
Inside the dropship, Clarke had Jasper on the floor. She cut his shirt open with a blade from the med kit, and the wound was worse than Cal had expected. Entry point just below the left collarbone, the spear's path carving through muscle and grazing the subclavian region. Blood welled with each heartbeat — not arterial spray, which meant the major vessels were intact, but steady and insistent and too much.
"I need— does anyone have—" Clarke's hands were red to the wrists. She pressed a wadded cloth against the wound and the cloth turned dark in seconds. "Antiseptic. I need antiseptic. Something to clean this."
"The med kit has alcohol wipes," Wells said from the doorway.
"Not enough. I need liquid antiseptic for irrigation. The wound track goes deep — if infection sets in before I can clean it out, he's dead inside a week."
Cal stood very still at the base of the ramp while the camp buzzed around him. Bellamy was organizing — actually organizing, for once, barking orders about the perimeter, posting real guards, his face set in the grim recognition that the wilderness had just introduced itself.
"We should mercy-kill him," someone said. Bellamy. Quiet, to Clarke, while Jasper's breathing rattled. "He's suffering. And if the Grounders hear—"
"No." Clarke didn't look up. "I'm not killing him."
"He's going to die anyway."
"Then he dies fighting. Not because we gave up."
Cal turned from the ramp and walked behind the dropship. The night was full. Stars overhead — more stars than anyone from the Ark had ever seen without a viewport between them and the vacuum — and the sounds of the forest pressed in from every direction. Insects. Wind. The distant call of something that might have been an owl or might have been something worse.
He crouched in the shadow of the landing strut, his back to the hull, and held his hands in front of his face.
The creation instinct. The one that had been knocking since landing, pressing against the inside of his skin like something trying to be born. It worked — in theory — by converting body fat into material at the molecular level. Lipid cells broken apart and rebuilt into whatever the user understood well enough to assemble atom by atom. The catch was knowledge. The user had to understand the molecular structure of the thing they wanted to create. Vague understanding meant failure. Deep understanding meant precision.
Hydrogen peroxide. H₂O₂. Two hydrogen atoms bonded to two oxygen atoms in a simple angular configuration. He'd studied it during his engineering degree — not as a chemist, but a three-percent solution was standard for wound irrigation, and the molecule itself was about as simple as chemistry got.
Cal pressed his right palm flat against his left forearm and focused.
The molecule. Two hydrogen, two oxygen. Bonded. A dilute solution, three percent, the rest water. Water he could visualize in his sleep — H₂O was the first thing anyone learned in chemistry. He built the compound in his mind, atom by atom, and pushed.
Pain.
Not the theoretical discomfort the instinct had promised. A lance of white heat shot up his palm, through his wrist, into his forearm. His vision jumped. The nanomachines in his skull screamed static, and for a terrifying half-second he thought he'd broken something — torn a muscle, ruptured a vessel, triggered some failsafe he didn't know existed.
Then his palm was wet.
He opened his hand. In the cup of his fingers, pooling in the creases of his skin, a thin film of clear liquid caught starlight. Not much. Maybe two tablespoons. Odorless. Faintly slick.
He raised it to his nose. The faint, clean sting of hydrogen peroxide. Three-percent solution, or close to it.
His hand was trembling. Not just his hand — his whole arm, from shoulder to fingertip, vibrated like a plucked wire. The creation had cost something. He could feel the deficit in his gut, a hollow pull, like he'd burned through a meal's worth of calories in ten seconds. His body fat — already lean from Ark rations — had donated material for two tablespoons of antiseptic and now wanted payment.
He breathed. Counted to ten. The shaking eased from violent to merely present.
Two tablespoons. Pathetic. But Clarke needed antiseptic and there was none, and this was real, and the powers were real, and Evan Cole's death on a wet highway had led to this: a teenager crouched behind a spaceship on a poisoned planet, pulling medicine from his own skin.
---
Cal found an empty medical vial in the supply crate. He poured the peroxide into it, sealed it, and wiped his palm on his pants.
The pain had faded to a deep, throbbing ache that pulsed with his heartbeat. He flexed his fingers — functional, if stiff. The nanomachines hummed louder than before, like the creation had woken something in their repair cycle. His head felt strange. Not painful. Pressurized.
He climbed the ramp. Clarke was still working on Jasper, her hands steady despite the blood, talking low and fast to Monty who was holding a light close to the wound. Wells stood behind them, passing supplies when asked, and the look on his face was the look of someone who refused to be useless.
"Found this." Cal held out the vial. "Supply kit in Crate Two. Must've been buried under the ration packs."
Clarke took it without looking up. Uncapped it, sniffed, and her eyes widened slightly.
"Hydrogen peroxide?" She tilted the vial, watching the liquid move. "This wasn't in the manifest."
"Manifest was incomplete. I've been going through everything since landing."
She studied him for one beat — the same clinical assessment from the morning, surgeon's eyes in a teenager's face — and then turned to the wound. She irrigated carefully, letting the peroxide foam against exposed tissue, and Jasper made a sound that wasn't a scream but lived next door to one.
"Hold him," Clarke said, and Monty and Wells held, and she worked.
Cal stepped back. His role was done — provider, not medic. He'd played it clean. Found antiseptic in a supply kit. Reasonable. Explainable. Nothing that required further questions.
Except Clarke glanced at him once as he turned, and the glance lasted half a second too long.
Filed that.
---
Midnight. Jasper was alive — sedated with the last of the med kit's painkillers, wound cleaned, chest wrapped in strips of uniform fabric Clarke had cut and folded into surprisingly effective bandages. The prognosis was bad and Clarke said so without dressing it up. Infection was likely. Fever would follow. Without real antibiotics, his immune system would fight alone.
Cal sat outside the dropship, back against the hull, chewing a ration bar that tasted like compressed sawdust and pretending it was enough. His body wanted three of them. He'd eat one now and steal a second during the small hours when nobody was counting.
The camp had changed. Jasper's blood had done what Bellamy's speech couldn't — made the danger real. Guards stood at the perimeter and actually watched the treeline. Fires stayed lit. Voices were low. A hundred teenagers who'd spent yesterday celebrating their freedom were now understanding what that freedom cost.
Grounders. The word moved through camp like smoke. People who lived in the forest, who threw spears with enough force to punch through a teenager's ribcage, who had been watching from the moment the dropship landed. Cal had known they were there. Nobody else had.
Bellamy was running security checks. Real ones, not performances. He moved between guard posts, spoke quietly, adjusted positions. Whatever else Bellamy Blake was — reckless, self-interested, dangerous — he understood that leadership meant standing between your people and the thing that wanted to eat them. The crisis had flipped a switch.
Clarke emerged from the dropship, wiping her hands on a rag that used to be white. She sat on the ramp, three meters from Cal, and let her head drop.
"He'll make it through the night," she said to no one in particular.
"That's not nothing."
She looked at him. The firelight caught her face — exhausted, blood in the creases of her knuckles, seventeen years old and performing surgery by torchlight.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"Cal Mercer. Crate organizer. Latrine architect."
"That's not what I'm asking."
He met her eyes. Held them. The pause was there — the one people close to him would eventually learn to read, the gap between truth and whatever he decided to offer instead.
"Someone who'd rather dig holes and sort rations than watch people die for no reason." He stood, brushing dirt from his pants. "Get some rest. Jasper needs you functional tomorrow."
He walked away before she could ask the follow-up. Clarke was smart, and smart people were dangerous to secrets, and Cal carried more secrets than any single person in this camp could survive hearing.
---
Two in the morning. The camp slept. Jasper's breathing was audible from inside the dropship — ragged, too fast, but present. Monty sat beside him and hadn't moved in hours.
Cal sat on the overturned crate near the fire pit, his stick map in the dirt updated with today's data: guard positions, water source, the bearing the expedition had taken to the river, the probable angle of the Grounder spear throw. He drew and erased and redrew, and his right palm ached each time his fingers closed around the stick.
Across the camp, at the very edge of the firelight, Charlotte sat on a rock.
She was small. Twelve, maybe thirteen. Blonde hair that hadn't been washed in days. Her arms wrapped around her knees, and she was staring at Wells, who sat alone near the secondary fire he'd built to keep warm. Wells was reading the wristband data on a screen he'd rigged from dropship parts, his face lit blue-white by the display, completely unaware of the girl watching him.
Charlotte's face was blank. Not sad, not angry. Blank. The expression of someone who'd already made a decision and was now just waiting for the right moment to execute it.
Cal's chest went tight.
In the show, Charlotte killed Wells on Night Three. Stabbed him in the neck with a knife she'd taken from the camp stores. She'd been having nightmares about her parents — floated by Chancellor Jaha — and Bellamy, in his infinite wisdom, had told her to "slay her demons." She'd taken it literally. Wells had died choking on his own blood in the dirt, and the murder had been pinned on Murphy, and Murphy had been banished, and the banishment had radicalized him, and the cascade of consequences had unspooled across the entire first season like a thread pulled from a sweater.
Two days. Wells had two days left on the clock.
Cal dropped the stick. Stood. Walked toward Wells with the kind of deliberate, unhurried pace that didn't attract attention.
"Hey." He stopped beside the secondary fire. Wells looked up, wristband display casting shadows across his face. "I need help with something inside the ship. Mapping the internal wiring — want to see if we can get the secondary console running for a weather relay."
Wells glanced at the display, then at Cal. "Now?"
"Best time. Nobody's using the space, and the work's quiet. Couple hours, maybe."
A long look. Wells searching for the angle, because Wells always searched for the angle — Chancellor's son, raised in politics, trained to ask what people wanted before he gave them what they asked for.
Whatever he found in Cal's face, it was enough.
"Alright." Wells powered down the display and stood. He grabbed a portable light from the supply stack. "Show me what you're working on."
Cal turned toward the dropship. As he walked, he let his gaze pass over Charlotte one more time. She watched Wells stand and follow Cal inside, and something in her blank expression flickered — disruption. The target was moving.
Good.
Inside the dropship, Cal pulled a panel off the wall and started tracing wire paths by lamplight while Wells held the light and asked questions that were better than they needed to be. Behind them, Jasper breathed. Outside, Charlotte sat alone in the cold, her window of opportunity closing by the minute.
Cal handed Wells a wire stripper and pointed to a junction box. "Start there. We've got a long night."
Wells took the tool. His hands were steady. He was alive, and Cal intended to keep him that way, one long night at a time.
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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:
🪙 Silver Tier ($6): Read 10 chapters ahead of the public site.
👑 Gold Tier ($9): Get 15-20 chapters ahead of the public site.
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