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Bellamy is sitting at the starboard window bay, starting to drift and dream, pleased that from this spot he can see both the Earth and the moon, when out of the corner of his eyes he sees the swiftest flash of white. He is startled. A woman has just run past him. She is wearing, improbably, a white spacesuit, stampeding down the hall in thick space boots, with her ponytail waving behind her as she goes. He sits up, tense, and watches her, as she skids to a halt at the end of the hall, turns herself around, and looks back. Bellamy thinks, at first, that she is staring at him. But her eyes are scanning instead across and past him, at the floor, along the walls, her body tense and alert. Her neck stretched. Her nose twitching.
“My helmet!” she says. And then: “I’m going to be late!”
“Late for what?” Bellamy asks.
“For the trial!” the spacewalker answers, with impatience, as she turns her wide-eyed attention to him. “I’ll be late for the trial!”
Bellamy tilts his head, unnerved, as if by pinpricks, at the word. “My sister’s trial?” he asks, although only a moment before, he had not been thinking of Octavia at all. “That isn’t for two years—”
But the spacewalker is not paying attention to him. “The Council of Hearts will not be pleased!” she says, and jumps, and briefly floats, as if the gravity within the ship could not hold her.
Bellamy stands, and leans down to pick up the helmet that is sitting at his feet. It is white, like the woman’s space suit, and has a raven painted on the side. “Is this what you’re looking for?” he asks, and starts to hold it out to her.
Then he sees that she is already gone.
She can’t leave the ship without her helmet, and she wouldn’t be wearing her suit if she were not leaving the ship. All of this is quite clear. So he runs after her, yelling, “Wait, wait!” as he traces her bounding, weightless movements in the distance, the flicker of her suit in the dark corridors. Another wave of brownouts is crossing the ship, and the lights above waver and threaten to go out. He loses track of her, finds her again. The hallways bend and turn. And finally he stumbles, still holding the helmet, into a shuttle bay, just in time to see the spacewalker disappearing through the open door of a grimy escape pod.
“Wait!” Bellamy calls. “You’ve forgotten your helmet!”
“No time, no time!” she yells back. “Get in if you’re coming! We’re late!”
He tries to answer that he does not have a suit, that he cannot, but he’s still holding the helmet with the raven on the side, and if she’s going to his sister’s trial, he must go too. He has no choice. So he runs to the escape pod and throws himself in through the opposite door.
Both doors close, sealing them tight inside. The ship takes off.
For a while, he can see nothing, though he has the distinct impression that he is falling
and falling
and falling.
And that the sky is very black and then the deepest blue and then that he has reached past the clouds. He is below the clouds. He’s on the ground.
His first impression of Earth, when he climbs out of the pod, is of a riot of color, so bright and so large that it overwhelms his eyes. He closes them tight, then blinks them open again. Beneath his feet, a flurry of flowers and plants unfurls, like a carpet, all around him, and to his right and left are scattered trees, so tall that he has to tilt his head back to see their outstretched branches and canopies of deep green leaves. The sky beyond them is the lightest and softest blue, studded with tiny, distant stars, and still, fluffy clouds.
He turns to the spacewalker, to ask her if she ever thought it would be like this, but she has disappeared again. He’s still holding her helmet, and he has no idea which way to go.
So he starts walking straight ahead.
How long he walks he isn’t sure, but the escape pod is only a spot in the distance behind him when he comes across the tea party. The table, long and rectangular and cluttered, stands directly in his path, yet he hesitates to approach. Sitting on either side of it are two figures wearing gas masks, examining the insides of empty teacups.
Except for the masks, they are wearing the same clothes that people on the Ark do, dark-toned and turning ratty with age. One is wearing a blue jacket; the other wears red.
As Bellamy watches, the one in blue removes the round canister from the bottom of the mask, brings a rolled joint to his mouth, inhales and then exhales a wide, drifting billow of smoke.
“Why are you wearing that stupid thing?” the other asks.
“Why are you?” the first counters.
Bellamy walks closer, and from here he can see that in addition to the teacups, the table holds a variety of plants in multi-colored planters, and a large, complicated glass still. Its component parts twist and turn until they end, at last, at a clear glass teapot with a curving spout. The two strangers are still arguing, but the conversation is as lazy as it is nonsensical, their words obscured as the air is by the passing of smoke.
When they notice Bellamy approaching, they stop abruptly, turn to him in sync, and remove their masks.
And Bellamy sees that they are both little more than kids. Octavia’s age, he thinks, or maybe younger. They look at him with curious but trusting eyes.
And then, after a moment, they grin.
“Don’t mind us,” the one in blue says, as he grabs a large pair of goggles from the table and places them on his head. “We’re just getting ready for tea.”
“We’re always getting ready for tea,” the other adds. He is putting on a pair of half-drooping rabbit ears.
“Because it’s always teatime.”
“Because it’s never not teatime. Because there is no time on Earth.”
“Did you know that time is a human invention?” Goggles is pouring from the teapot at the end of the still, into a chipped blue teacup. He offers it to Bellamy. “Tea?”
“That’s not tea,” Bellamy answers.
Goggles frowns, briefly, takes a sip, and says, “What do you know? It’s not.”
The conversation, Bellamy sees, is going nowhere, and will go nowhere as long as these two mad fools are in charge. Beyond them, he can see that the path he has found himself on divides, and at the point of division a signpost has been placed. Its arrows point in four directions: to the right, to the left, back in the direction he has come, and straight up toward the sky. On three of the arrows are painted the words this way. On the fourth, the arrow pointing up, the word NOT has been added in sloping red letters.
Helpful, Bellamy thinks. He gets the boys’ attention again, and points toward the sign. “I’m trying to get to the trial,” he says. “At the… Council of Hearts? Do you know where that is?”
Rabbits Ears tilts his head, and the drooping ear skims against the side of his cheek. “The Council of Hearts?” he repeats. “No, that’s gone. The Queen of Hearts is in charge now. You’ll have to go through the Wasteland to get to her.”
“Do you happen to know,” Bellamy asks, “whose trial it is, anyway?”
“Why do you want to go to the trial if you don't know whose trial you’re going to?” Rabbit Ears asks.
“It could be anyone,” Goggles puts in. His brows furrow, and he takes another sip from his teacup. “The Queen of Hearts does love to chop off people’s heads!”
“Or send them into space!”
“Or send them past space!”
“What is past space, anyway?” Goggles asks, pushing teacups and potted plants out of the way, leaning his elbows on the table and resting his chin in his hands.
“Space that used to exist,” Rabbit Ears answers sagely. “But now does not.” He turns abruptly to Bellamy, and adds, “But if you want to see her anyway, her Palace is that way.” He stretches out his arm and points sharply to the path off to the right.
“Ah, but first—” Goggles reaches out to him, vaguely gesturing—“would you give me that, there?”
“He likes to collect things,” Rabbit Ears stage whispers, as Bellamy hands over the spacewalker’s white helmet.
“You have fun with that,” he says, waving vaguely, inching his way around the table and toward the rightward path.
Up ahead, if Rabbit Ears is to be trusted, is the Wasteland, but whatever that might be, he can’t believe it will be stranger than what he’s seen so far.
After a while, as he continues along the trail, the lush garden of the Earth so far begins to wither and fall away, and the landscape turns desolate. The flowers and grasses and myriad bright colors disintegrate into grainy, dun-colored sand dunes, and desolation.
Up ahead, he catches sight of a single, gnarled tree, short and stunted compared to the giants behind him, with a long, knotted branch extending out from its side. As he comes even with it, he notices, floating above this branch, a grin.
Only a grin, by itself, flashing square, white teeth.
Bellamy stops. He stares at the grin, and as he stares, the air around it sizzles as if burned by the sun, and takes shape, and settles at last into the form of a girl. She has long blonde hair, worn loose over her shoulders, and the same wide and slightly taunting smile.
“What are you doing here, traveler?” she asks.
And Bellamy answers, “I’m on my way to see the Queen of Hearts.”
“Oh, why do you want to see her?” The girl leans forward on the last word, curling her body toward him just as she curls the syllable around her tongue, and Bellamy briefly worries that she will fall right to the ground. But she holds her balance. “Are you hoping to know what she knows? I know some of what she knows but—” She sits up straight again, squaring her shoulders, and then wiggling them slightly in a prissy, princess way. “That is to be expected, after all.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Bellamy answers.
The girl sighs, and he thinks at first that she must find him slow, which annoys him. Then he realizes that she is barely paying attention to him. She is looking out past him, to an invisible spot in the far distance. “I’ve been by myself a long while now,” she says, wistful, and almost sweet.
Bellamy wants to come closer, perhaps even reach out to her. But as soon as her eyes flick to him again, the grin is back. The mask is up.
She twists around on the branch and then lets herself tip back, until she’s hanging upside down by her knees. As she stares at Bellamy in this position, with her hair tickling just above the ground, the smile that should be appearing to him now as a frown seems just as wicked, just as clever, just as intriguing as before—so much so that he does not notice at first that she is fading again.
“Careful,” he says, half-holding out his arm toward her. “You don’t want to fall.”
“We’ll all fall eventually,” she answers, a distant voice from a hidden place, until only the smile is left still floating. And then even that is gone.
“Funny,” Bellamy murmurs to himself, as if also from far reaches, “I have seen a girl without a smile before, but never a smile without a girl.”
Looking out along the path, he still cannot see the Queen’s palace, but he continues on his way just the same.
From the wasteland, he enters what might be a forest: all around him are a multitude of the same enormous, towering trees he first saw when he arrived. And beyond the trees, a range of gray triangles in the distance, partially white, which he takes to be mountains. And in front of the mountains, between them and the edge of the forest where he stands, is a castle, surrounded by a garden.
The castle reminds him of the Ark: scratched and dented and gray, scarred with inscrutable symbols, tilted and worse for wear. The arch at the back reminds him of the Alpha Station arch, the turrets of nuclear warheads. From the castle entrance, a path extends, lined to either side with rose trees. They are not as tall as the other trees and, in place of leaves, they are topped with bouquets of perfectly blooming flowers. Closest to the castle, the roses are red. At the other end of the path, they are white. And halfway down the row of them, two young men—two boys, he might say—in the familiar, bulky uniforms of the Guard, are painting the white roses of one of the trees with haphazard slaps of red paint.
As Bellamy follows the path toward them, he sees that the backs of their Guard jackets are patterned after playing cards. One boy, the scruffier of the two, is the Ace of Hearts. The other is the Jack.
“Excuse me,” Bellamy says. “Is this the palace of the Queen of Hearts?”
“Of course it is!” Ace answers, flinging drops of red paint from the end of his brush. “Who else would want the flowers painted red?”
“Then do you know where the trial is?” Bellamy asks. He gets the distinct impression that neither of the boys will be much help, though Jack does seem thoughtful as he slathers thick streaks of red across the tree. He pauses for a moment to adjust the faded black beanie on his head.
“All of us have been on trial,” he says. “And none of us will be again. Are you sure you’re in the right place?”
Bellamy takes a deep breath, opens his mouth as if to answer, but only exhales. “No,” he mutters under his breath, “not at all. I think that I’m in all the wrong places, actually.”
Before he can say anything more, the gates to the castle open, and a woman marches out, in the full regalia of royalty, with her nose held so high that Bellamy cannot quite make out her face. She is holding a scepter topped with a round, golden ball in the shape of the Chancellor’s pin. And though he cannot see who she is, he feels that he still knows her, that he’s seen her in the shadowy, ill-lit Council chambers—that he’s seen her in Medical, harried, in her blue doctor’s coat.
Two Guards walk behind her, holding a struggling prisoner between them in a steel-grip.
“We now call this court—” the Queen announces, “to disorder!”
And disorder it is. The Queen steps aside, and the Guards throw the prisoner to the ground at her feet, and Bellamy rushes forward, because he sees that the prisoner is his sister, grown weak and frail without him, scrambling fearfully against the dirt. He tries to hold her, and at first, she does not know he is. But when he gets his arms around her, she collapses at last against him, shaking, pressing her nose and cheek against his shoulder and clawing feebly at his arms.
“Who is this?” the Queen roars, and Bellamy looks up, into her livid, fuming red face. She has her hands on her hips, smoke coming out of her ears. “What are you doing?”
He has no chance to answer. The spacewalker is bounding out from between the trees, yelling, “I’m late, I’m late! Am I late?” as she bounces with moon-leaps across the ground.
“Not late at all,” Goggles answers, from his spot at the table behind the Queen.
“Just on time,” Rabbit Ears adds. They clink their teacups together. “It’s only just begun.”
“Or perhaps it’s not begun at all,” comes a high-up voice, from a sly, floating grin at the top of a white rose tree.
“It’s you!” the Queen screeches, pointing her scepter at the blonde-haired girl. “How did you get here? Ooooh, off with her head!”
“Off with my head? Off from what?” the girl asks, as all of her body, except for her head, fades away and disappears.
The Queen looks so furious that Bellamy starts to fear she will explode, and he holds Octavia’s tighter against his chest. “If I can’t have her head,” she screams, “if I can’t have anyone’s head—then—then I’ll send you all away instead!”
“Away to where?” Rabbit Ears asks, with a curious tilt of his head.
“Well—to Earth! I’ll send you to Earth!”
“But we’re already on Earth,” Bellamy says, quite confused, and everyone around him starts to laugh. Even Octavia is laughing. He can feel her shaking in his arms. The laughter grows and grows, until he can all but see it, all but feel it pressing in on him, darkening and blurring the rest of the scene.
“Already on Earth,” the grinning, blonde girl repeats. Her voice seems to echo from a great distance away. It’s barely audible beneath the laughter, through the twirling, tilting, landscape—everything dizzy and unstable at his feet—
*
And a knocking at his door.
Waking him.
*
Bellamy shakes himself free, brushes off the settled dust of dreams. The knocking is so urgent that he cannot wait for himself to settle into consciousness again; he has to drag his heavy body, stumbling, twisting over his own feet, toward the door. “Coming—I’m coming,” he calls out in a groggy, broken voice.
Commander Shumway is standing in the hallway outside Bellamy’s quarters. They have not spoken face to face since Octavia’s arrest.
“Janitor Blake,” he says. “I have an offer that may be of some interest to you.”
And Bellamy does not trust him at all, not in the slightest, but because he knows he has no choice, he lets the Commander in.