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Day four-hundred-twenty-three in the bleak, eternal nothingness of space. A recent meeting with a couple of moonshiners replenished both our supplies and our spirits, but now boredom has set in once again. Absolute, mind-numbing boredom. Here on the bridge we have former smuggler Octavia Blake behind the wheel, anthropologist Bellamy Blake attempting to scan for points of interest in this interminable wasteland, myself at navigation—
"Murphy! Stop narrating!"
A sharp kick lands against his shin, sending a shot of pain right through the bone. He scowls and tries to turn his chair out of the way, but he can only twist so many degrees to the side. He’s still unfortunately stuck within Octavia's kicking range.
"We can hear you," she adds. "You know that, right?"
"Yeah." He crosses his arms on the edge of the navigation console, shrugs his shoulders up toward his ears. "I know. The full force of the space madness hasn't hit me yet."
"Don't joke about space madness," Bellamy's low, measured voice grumbles from behind them. He hasn't even looked up from the screen he's been monitoring all morning, a green radar blip of never-changing nothing. But he does manage a quick, disparaging glance at Murphy.
"Who says I'm joking?" he mumbles, and swings his chair back around again. Being stuck equidistant between the two Blakes has become a new level of torture, an impossible choice between Octavia's barely concealed violence and Bellamy's cutting judgment. "Also, what is the point of any of us right now?" he adds, louder this time, as he sits up straight again and looks from one sibling to the other. "Captain Clarke set on this path herself and if I tried to make any suggestions about where we should go or how we should get there, she’d probably kill me. There's nothing out here, so Elder Blake is completely pointless—"
"But the ship still needs a pilot," Octavia finishes. "Which makes me essential."
"Until Clarke switches the controls to twenty-four-seven autopilot," Murphy corrects.
Octavia sends him another death-glare. "I'd like to see her try."
"We don't know there's nothing out here," Bellamy says. He's pulled his eyes away from the screen for once, though, the most definite indication yet that his mind's gone as numb as Murphy's has. Instead, he's staring ahead, at the view screen, into a blackness devoid of either planets or stars. "That's the whole definition of unexplored space."
"Maybe no one's explored it because it's boring."
Octavia rolls her eyes. "You were the one who wanted to come out here," she reminds him. "When we ran into Miller at the Polaris Space Station and he was telling us all those legends about this quadrant—you were into it. Don't lie."
"I'll admit it. The legends were cool. Unexplained radio signals, like—what did he call it?"
"Whale music," Bellamy says, low and wistful, and Murphy snaps his fingers.
"Like whale music. Coming from this area. Distant, plaintive wailing. Haunted space. Of course that's cool! And so was the one day we heard—all that distorted crackling, and your useless-ass scanner went nuts. That felt like we were getting somewhere—"
He cuts himself off abruptly, all the excitement in his voice strangled by the words that would come next. They turn instead into a low and bitter aaah, an aborted gesture, a twitching gaze. A defeated rounding of his shoulders. The silence that follows, marred only by the persistent beeping from Bellamy's station, forms thick and heavy like the lump in Murphy's throat. No need to go over the rest of the story, of course. Especially not to the two people who already know as much as he'd ever dare to tell them.
When the instruments went haywire and the radio distortion so loud and so manic they could not bear to listen to it any longer, and the lone desert planet, a third the size of Earth, appeared in the view screen straight ahead like a dusky jewel uncovered beneath sifting wasteland sands, he was the one to take the shuttle down with Raven and Clarke. He'd taken pictures and scanner readings of a desolation more tragic and unbearable than anything he’d ever seen. The mission reminded him, at first, of the old urbex adventures he used to have, climbing chain link fences and creeping through crumbling, abandoned factories with his high school girlfriend, the sort of thrilling shit that beat a hollow in his chest—but it was beautiful then, too. He and Emori would watch the sunset from weed-strewn playgrounds, in the shadow of apartments where no one had lived for years, imagined themselves the last people on Earth and found something romantic in the vision.
But the red desert planet played on a new frequency entirely. He was alone—Clarke and Raven off exploring some caves, while he took in the ruins of what seemed to have once been a city—and that might have been the central difference, the main reason he felt every aching muscle of his body tense with each step, why he had to force himself to look around corners, and not to glance back the way he'd come. Or maybe it was something else. The memory of the insane, violent, screeching of the radio. The ship's instruments on high, confused alert. The piercing, high pitch of the winds around him; the sound of complete and utter desertion. The impossible shapes of the decimated buildings, like giant fans rising up from the red-gold sand, pockmarked and whistling with the desolate wind. He'd found no signs of any life or former life, other than the structures themselves. So many layers of sediment and sand had blown across the city that he could no longer guess how much of it might have been lost beneath his feet, and at times he would find himself whistling in the hot, clammy inside of his space suit, as if he were creeping through a cemetery, warding off ghosts.
Just as he had not shared this experience with Bellamy or Octavia, he had not asked Raven and Clarke what had happened to them in the caves. Enough that they both got out of there alive, that's how he'd felt in the moment—more than they could say of their last adventure, at least. Plus, he'd become adept at reading Raven's face, knew that that particular closed-off and stoic look meant that he should keep his silence, too.
"The point is that we're going from nowhere to nowhere," he says now, an unearned confidence, and frustration to match, in his voice. "We found the weird thing already, and there—wasn't anything there. Mission accomplished. Time to go back."
Neither of them answers at first, nor even dares to look at him.
Then: "Clarke doesn't think we're going nowhere," Bellamy says.
"And you don't think that's weird?" Murphy snaps, swiveling toward him again. "That she's so confident and so hell-bent on this one particular random direction through nothing—?"
Octavia snorts. "Do we think it's weird that Clarke's confident? No. Have you met Clarke?"
"Both of you, shut up." Bellamy waves his hand vaguely in their direction. He's bent fully over his station now, fiddling, not with the scanner, but with the comms controls next to it, his other hand pressing the left side of his headset closer against his ear. "We're getting something."
"Fuck off, we are not," Murphy grumbles. But already he knows he's wrong. Bellamy has pulled off his headset in frustration and Murphy can hear it, so faint it cannot be described as words or even proper noise, a hint of something definite flitting in and out of focus through the static as Bellamy turns the volume up.
"This is—kadia—calling—ship—Ar—"
Octavia shakes her head slowly. She's turned her chair all the way to the side, leaning forward over her knees, her hand over her mouth. "No way," she whispers, but the words are as muffled as the crackling, interference-distorted words over the channel.
"The Arkadia is not all the way out here," Murphy adds.
And I was not walking on dead aliens last week, probably, because that would be too weird. And weird things don't happen in space. Ever.
Bellamy shushes them both, fiddling with the dial.
"—The Arkadia—calling—all ships—Zeta—eighteen—four—"
"Shit," Murphy swears, long and drawn out, under his breath.
"Zeta quadrant eighteen-four, what?" Octavia asks. "That's not a whole location."
"Might be the best we can get," Bellamy answers, as the static rises up again over the words.
"Is that an SOS?" Murphy asks. "He didn't say SOS."
"We didn't get the whole message," Bellamy says. "But it could be a call for a rendezvous—could be he found something. Could be anything."
"But that was definitely Kane's voice," Octavia adds, the words too confident to form a question. "Even distorted. That was him. So we need to answer." When no responds right away, she adds, "We owe him."
"We do," Bellamy agrees, reluctantly, uncertainly, as he drops his hands down to his lap again. The static has taken over now, any sense of coherence receding like waves away from the shore.
"Yeah, only two problems," Murphy says, slumping low in his chair. "We only have half an address—and what we do have, is in the opposite direction of Clarke's precious coordinates."
*
The lower deck of the ship houses the morgue and the lab. This is where Raven lives now.
When she bothers to sleep, short stints of blackout unconsciousness, during which she becomes heavy and unmovable as the dead, it's in Murphy's bunk more often than her own. So he feels entitled to enter her private lair whenever he wants. He's the only one of the crew who ever does. And even then, he asks himself what the hell he thinks he's doing, every single time, what he thinks will happen when he takes the elevator down into the dark underbelly of the ship, travels the hallway with the burned out lights, follows the emergency strips along the floor to the always-closed door at the end of the hall. He knows it's Raven on the other side.
But something tickling there in the back of his brain says, every time, maybe it's not.
She's changed so much since Finn died. Maybe it's not anymore.
He knocks first to be polite, then lets himself in.
Raven's bank of computers and various inscrutable instruments have sapped so much power that the overhead lights tend to flicker and hum on a good day. In the uncertain, crackling light, she appears as a crazed phantom in the center of the scene. Wisps of hair fly free of her ponytail, and her back forms an awkward hunch as she bends over her microscope or her calculations or her notes. Across her worktable, bits of grungy-metallic tech, rusted and broken, in blocks and curls of shapes, glow a faint green, or flicker more manically than the lights do. Murphy tried to pick one up once, but she slapped it out of his hands. He remembers only that it was heavier than he'd anticipated, and so rough that it scraped and burned the delicate skin of his fingertips.
Compared to the strewn bits of blackened, faintly glinting metal, the left side of Raven's work table is nearly immaculate: beakers and test tubes artfully arranged, something green-blue and the near-consistency of slime bubbling slowly, like witch's brew, above the dancing blue of a Bunsen burner flame.
Behind her, a clear board marked with manic scribbles of calculations and half-formed notes reads like a banner of growing madness. In the last days, the smears of shoddily erased lines have grown thicker, the dots and lines of new notations increasingly foreign and wild.
The computer bank along the far wall whirs steadily, and on the other side of the room, a second worktable has been quickly cleared, then filled with lines of dead and dying plants that list against themselves. Shriveled, brown leaves crack and fall into the dirt. Sad tendrils drape themselves over the edges of the pots and trail along the tabletop. Raven traded several more valuable objects, from the early and more fruitful of their adventuring days, to the moonshiners for this once vibrant collection of greenery: a mad decision then, made only more inscrutable by the way she's let the plants wither and die under her care.
Murphy stands in the doorway of the lab, watching her work. She doesn't look up. She's too intent upon her task, tweezing apart one of the strange metallic blocks, and so Murphy lets himself be intent, too, on the delicate movements of her fingers, the intensity of her gaze, the manic focus he can feel in every inch of her. Those useless and ancient bits of tech didn't come from any planet, outpost, or space station controlled by human law. He knows this, but pretends he does not know, when he sees Raven's laser-precise and computer-quick genius brain prying them apart, putting them back together again, forming out of them some still inscrutable machine—he knows she scavenged them from deep within that cave. He recognizes the smell of them, like acrid, burning metal, like the deep rot and decay that creeps into any place too long left untouched by living hands.
"Raven," he says, and the lights flicker off and on again, and as they turn on, she lifts her head and he sees the sallow thin stretch of her skin across her skull. Her eyes shine bright, open too wide as she recognizes him.
"John Murphy," she answers, long and slow—awe in her voice, as if she had not seen him for years. She pushes back her stool but doesn't stand, and he rushes toward her before she can. He's never seen her faint before but she's trembling; he sees the shaking in her hand and hears it barely trapped there in her voice. Some instinct tells him to be there in the moment before she falls.
She doesn't fall, but she grabs onto his arm with thin fingers that feel like claws, and tilts her head back to look at him, an eerie curl of a smile at the corner of her lips.
"I'm really close, Murphy," she whispers.
It's her voice, he tells himself, only that, crackling and hoarse and quiet, subsumed beneath the computer whir and the bubbling of that viscous brew. It’s only her dry voice that stiffens his spine and makes the hairs on his arms stand on end.
"We have a problem, Raven—" he tries to tell her, but she catches his face between her hands and shakes her head. Her palms are cold.
"There's only one problem and I'm going to solve it," she answers. She yanks him closer. He stumbles, his toe banging against the leg of her stool, and his hands reaching automatically for balance at her waist. She's on the edge of laughter. He feels it in the uneven, distracted way she kisses him.
But he kisses back because she's still Raven, even sleep-deprived, even distracted. She's starting to forget herself, but he remembers her. He steps closer, wraps his arms more securely around her, as if he hoped she might recall something of her own true self in the familiarity of him.
When she pulls away, she's breathless and the quick jump of her gaze across his face more alive, more real than her prior wide-eyed stare. But still he knows it didn't work. She fists her hands in his shirt; she grins that same unhinged and frenzied grin.
"I'm trying to tell you that we're going to have a problem with Clarke—"
"Clarke." She rolls her eyes. "I can handle Clarke." She tugs on his shirt, grabs at his sides like she could shake him into sense. "Don't worry about her. Let me show you this. Get me a plant."
He doesn't understand what she means, until she gestures wildly toward the shelf of dead and drooping vegetation behind him. "Does it matter which—?"
"No, no, just get me one."
Murphy sighs, but humors her. He picks a small spider plant, its leaves brown and its soil dry and crumbling, and sets it next to Raven on the table. Whatever this is, it's a waste of time that he knows, on instinct, they do not have—Raven down in the hidden recesses of the ship, fiddling with the past, while they're moving farther and farther away from the only true sign of life they've heard for weeks—
Like her, he has taken his fill of death. He's done.
She's putting together various broken pieces of tech, fitting them together like a puzzle, edges that should not match now carved and chipped away so that they snap neatly into place. He wants to tell her that okay, it's a cool trick, the way it glows, because it's eerie and it's not right, it's not meant for them, and he needs to pull her away from the seductive crystal glint of what he perceives now to be a machine. But Raven is already taking the plant out of its pot and setting it down on the center of the pedestal.
Then she turns off the Bunsen burner, and uses an eye dropper to transfer some of the still bubbling murky slime from the beaker to the plant. Just a few drops. Then a few drops more.
Nothing happens for a long while.
And then something does.
The leaves of the plant mellow and move, infused with a deep, crystalline green. They shake as if in an invisible breeze. The bits soil of still clinging to the roots are just the same, still dry and useless, and the roots stretch and shake until they are free. Raven takes her hands from the plant, but it does not fall. Murphy closes his eyes. There's life in it, life he can see even through his eyelids, life he can feel like a sickness in his gut. The spider plant reminds him of the sunroom in his aunt's house, the first clear memory he has of the murky black days after his father's death. But with his eyes closed, feeling the unnatural warmth of it, sensing the creeping neediness of it, the wild unnatural strength of it, he can think of nothing else as strongly as the towering and sinister shells on the desert planet's surface, the sense of being watched by something not-quite-dead, not-quite-alive above.
He'd thought it mere memory then. Something once beautiful, barely held together, surviving despite all odds and the great vast passage of time.
Now he doesn't know.
He opens his eyes again. Raven is sitting, enraptured, watching the plant's leaves wave in their own personal breeze.
"Whatever it is," Murphy says, low and dangerous, "you need to kill it."
Raven just laughs, but there's no humor in the sound. She reaches out one hand blindly and grabs his hand, squeezes it so tightly that his bones hurt. "Murphy," she answers, "that's the exact opposite of what I need to do."
*
Murphy steps out of the elevator, still dazed, still sick with the after-effects of everything he saw down below. His only thought is to get to his quarters, but when he turns the corner, he finds his way blocked, the way blocked by Bellamy and Clarke, staring each other down. He takes a step back. They both notice him but do not care.
Murphy hasn’t seen Clarke anywhere but the ship’s archives for days, and here beneath the high, weak hallway lights, her expression appears pinched, her face narrow and her skin too pale. Maybe that’s how they all look now, though: too much time spent away from the sun.
“No—” she insists, with a hard, chopping motion of her hand, then cuts herself off with a sharp exhale.
Off with his head.
She takes a deep, searing breath, as if gathering herself, and Murphy wonders if Bellamy notices the sharp, crystalline glint in her eye. "No, no, definitely not. We are not changing course. Not for Kane—"—the name lilting and mocking—"—not for anyone or anything." She crosses her arms tight against her chest, mirroring Bellamy's stony and immovable stance. He doesn't answer. Clarke takes a step closer, and Murphy takes a step away.
"I'm in charge, aren't I?" she asks.
"We're both in charge," Bellamy answers, a quiet threat through clenched teeth.
From where he's standing, Murphy can see only part of Bellamy's expression, but Clarke's face is spot lit and clear. She rearranges her features slowly, with effort; her mouth and eyes soften. She stretches up on her toes and rests one palm against Bellamy's cheek.
"I'm asking you," she says quietly, "to trust me. You do trust me, don't you? I'm not leading us into nothing. I have a plan—I can't share it with you yet, but I do have one."
Out of the corner of his eye, Murphy can see her fingers stretch and curl up into Bellamy's hair. He can only imagine how quickly Bellamy is crumbling. That he still manages to argue is a feat.
"This mission is becoming madness," he whispers. "We're chasing ghosts. You know that."
A long silence, which Murphy spends staring fixedly down at his shoes. If the hallways weren't so narrow, he'd try to slip past them. The quiet itself feels like it is hardening, like soil baking and cracking under a hot sun—what the desert planet must have felt once, before its whole solar system went black.
"I do not," Clarke says, at last, and pulls away. As she shoves her way past Bellamy and Murphy, she adds, "Keep the coordinates as they are. Your friend's ship can wait."
They both watch her go, Bellamy's arms crossed tight against his chest again, Murphy's hands deep in his pockets as he toes awkwardly at a seam in the floor.
"You have to admit," he says, "that was weird."
Bellamy just grunts.
"It was! Calling the Arkadia 'your friend's ship.' Not caring at all about her own stepdad." He drops his voice, knowing the last is a low blow. "Pulling rank."
"She's just focused," Bellamy answers. "She gets that way sometimes. You know Clarke's one-track mind."
Murphy shrugs. He does, but he knows his instincts, too. Clarke's never had a plan she didn't want to share, unless secrecy itself was an integral component. And of all the people she's played, Murphy never thought Bellamy was one. But he's staring after her now as if her touch were still familiar to him, as if he'd trust the gentle curl of her fingers around the shell of his ear, more than he'd trust even his own gut.
*
Murphy wakes early the next morning to an eerily quiet ship. He is not even certain it is morning. Their circadian lights have always been unreliable; yet it’s not the color of his surroundings, but their texture, that makes him feel as if he’s adrift in the hazy hour of pre-dawn. He rolls out of his bunk without checking the time: meaningless here anyway, at the end of all life as he knows it.
His boots are half-hidden beneath the bed; he pulls them on but only laces them halfway, and doesn't get dressed, so his footsteps are clunky and too loud as he heads down the hall toward the mess. He rubs at his eyes with the back of his hands, and runs his fingers through his hair, to give it a crazed, exaggerated bed head look. The other doors are closed, no sign of anyone awake but himself. Maybe he is crazed. Maybe he is dreaming.
Maybe he needs an extra shot of his high-caffeine coffee-substitute.
The lights in the mess whir and click as they turn on, shimmering above him before they settle, coating the room in an artificial, fluorescent sheen. He stomps over to their version of a coffee pot, which, like all good fakes, looks very much like that which it was meant to replace, and follows the same ritual that has kept him afloat every day since he was fifteen. The comfort of it. The repetition. The warmth of the mug in his hand and the ripple of the dark liquid inside as he blows on it to help it cool.
He slumps down at the nearest table and listens to the ship.
Something not quite right about her today. He knows the ship is moving, zooming off in the wrong direction, solely under the control of a woman possibly gone mad—but he does not feel it moving. He feels, instead, as if the whole structure around him were absolutely still. And in this stillness and this calm, he is too aware of his own heart steadily beating.
But he knows something about mad women, doesn’t he? He thinks about the scientist on the lower deck, playing with the most powerful of forces, with death itself—how he loves her not despite of this hubris but because of it. Is she still down there? Has she been tinkering with her discovery all through the deep and artificial night? Working by that sick, green alien glow?
When they reach where they're going, what will she set free?
The door to the mess opens with a delayed shift of sound, catching briefly on itself before it slides away, and Murphy looks up so fast that his neck spasms. He rubs at it slowly, wincing. Clarke barely seems to notice him, only sends a quick glance his way before she heads toward the coffee pot and pours herself a mug.
"Captain Griffin," he greets her anyway, with a short nod of his head.
"Crewman Murphy," she answers, just as steady, as she sits down across from him. Their voices do nothing to dent the unnatural silence of the room. Murphy sits quietly and watches her, his heavy head resting against his fist, trying to figure out what about her does not seem true. He's known Clarke Griffin over ten years now. The careful way that she sits, how she pushes a strand of hair behind her ear, the slow and deliberate sips she takes from her mug: each gesture is correct and wrong at the same time, like an actor playing Clarke, a not-quite-memorized script.
All these thoughts, he wonders, perhaps no more than the fragments of dreams. The incipient space madness he's not supposed to joke about.
"Crewman Blake," she says, at last, as suddenly and as calmly as if they had already been conversing, "picked up another transmission from the Arkadia early this morning."
Murphy sits up straight again, not from surprise but as if called to attention. He tries to make his voice sound casual, but it creaks on him. "What did it say?"
"It was an SOS. He tried to insist we turn around but I told him that wasn't possible."
"Really?" He spits out the question without thinking, and Clarke's sharp gaze snaps right to him. "You don't want to help Kane? What about Abby?"
"What about her?"
Too fast. Like a dare. He can see that she's breathing too hard now, on edge, and that any outward show of calm she might have had when she walked in was only a shallow ruse.
"Oh, I don't know," Murphy answers lightly, defiantly, and shrugs. "She's only your mom. Kane's wife. She's probably on that ship."
Clarke blinks, once, but doesn’t look away. He watches her rubbing the tip of her finger against the side of her mug: a nervous tic he does not recognize.
Something he cannot quite name, knotted up there in his throat, seeping all the way through him like cracks in black ice, is threatening, is coming to its final form.
"Of course," Clarke says, but he reads the false note in her voice like he's read every false and cheery lie that's ever been told to him. "Abby. We'll return for them later—"
"That's not how an SOS works."
"She would understand."
"She wouldn't."
Cracks and sharp breaks in the invisible, black ice. He feels the frigid cold of it. Cold all the way down his spine, in his veins.
You don't know who Abby is, do you?
"I'm just a little confused," he says, slowly, each of the words chipped with care from the ice. "I know family's always been important to you. Just like it is to me. I mean if it were my sister, Emori, on that ship, you know I'd turn this old boat around like that—" He snaps his fingers. Keeps staring at Clarke, unwilling to look away as long as she will look at him.
She hesitates, then, and that's enough.
I'm an only child and an orphan was one of the first things he said to her, in the bar in D.C. where they met. Then they spent the whole night drinking, and he told her about Emori and she told him about Wells: the first relationships that changed them, how they each knew they had it in them to be soft.
As soon as she starts to speak again—"I'm sure your sister would understand too—"—he shoves his chair away, and the movement makes the coffee splash over the top of his mug and Clarke's. It must be still hot, but it doesn't scald her hands. She does not seem to notice the burn of it, and when she looks up at him again, her once-familiar blue eyes flash an alien gold.
Murphy trips backward over his chair, trying to put space between them, and the sound it makes as it crashes to the floor makes his heart jump. "You're—you are not Clarke," he says, barely, his voice shaking as badly as his body does. The words are idiotic. But he can't stop them. He can't stop his hands from trembling.
Clarke, or whoever it is alone with him in the mess, stands up slowly. "I've told you again and again," she says, each word sharp and distinct, "that we're going to the homeworld. All you have to do is not get in the way. It's very simple." She smiles, but the smile does not look human, even stretched across a human face.
"The homeworld," he echoes, dumbstruck or skeptical, not even he can tell.
"Yes. I've been waiting on the colony for many, many centuries. Now I want to return home. That's all I want. You can understand that, can't you? You're also far from home." As she speaks, she walks slowly and deliberately closer. For each step she takes forward, Murphy takes a step back. He bangs into another chair, and then a table.
"What have you done to my friends?"
"Why do you assume I've done anything to them?"
She's calm now, cold and icy calm—no more pressure, he thinks faintly, to keep up her difficult ruse. All out in the open now. All so easy. He backs himself up against the wall, right next to the comms unit, and quickly smashes his open palm against the talk button. "Octavia?" he calls. "Bellamy? Raven? Anyone—come in. This is Murphy—come in."
The unit only crackles and hisses with static.
"Oh, yeah, no reason to assume you did anything," he spits, turning wildly toward the other again. "Where are they?"
"Octavia is in her room," the being answers. "And now that the ship is on autopilot and heading precisely on its necessary course, that's where she'll stay. Much simpler that way." When Murphy only glares, his own breath hot and urgent, burning now in his lungs, she smiles at him again. "I didn't hurt her," she insists. "Just...locked her away."
"For simplicity."
"Yes. For simplicity."
"And Bellamy?" he asks. "Raven?"
"Raven is in her lab."
Murphy presses himself against the wall, though she's not making any move to close the last few feet between them. His eyes dart from one side of the mess to the other; he tries to calculate how fast he can launch himself toward the door.
"I notice you don't have any assurances to offer about Bellamy."
The being sighs. "I told you. He insisted on turning around. What's important now, Murphy, is—do you feel the same?"
She takes a step forward and in the same instant, as if on a hair-trigger spring, he jumps over the nearest fallen chair and runs toward the door. He can hear the being coming after him, but she's not running, while he's sprinting faster than he ever has in his life. Not even cops on his tail have made him pound pavement, or shaky metal flooring, like this. He barely swerves in time to make it out the door and into the hall, around another corner, and toward the back of the ship. The bridge is the obvious place to go, the only place where he might be able to gain back control—
But he's not heading toward the bridge.
Halfway to the elevator, he rounds another corner so fast he almost trips over his own loosely tied boots, then skids abruptly to a halt. There's a body slumped against the wall, head lolling against its shoulder, legs splayed out into the corridor. Dead, he thinks, first, and then, Bellamy. But at the sound of his footsteps, the body groans and the head sways blearily to the side, like it's trying to lift itself up, and Murphy throws himself down on his knees by his friend's side.
"Bellamy—Bellamy, fuck, what happened?"
"Clarke—" He winces, shakes his head and rubs at his eyes with one bloody hand. "Not her—that thing—"
"The alien," Murphy says. Might as well call it what it is. He has no space for surprise and barely any for fear; he's already followed the worst of the blood to Bellamy's leg, a deep stab wound in the thigh hastily bandaged with a torn strip of Bellamy's own shirt. "I guess you figured that out by now."
"Yeah," Bellamy answers, "the alien. Figured. Biggest hint was when she stabbed me." He lolls his head to the side, then takes a deep breath, and forces himself to sit up straighter against the wall. "Clarke would never do that."
Murphy laughs, the light and nervous laughter of the terminally scared. He's about to ask if there's something he can do, when Bellamy abruptly reaches out and fists a hand in the front of his shirt, yanks him so close they're almost nose to nose. Murphy can see every ounce of effort he's putting into maintaining a steady and decisive gaze. "Listen," he says, and the word sounds like gravel, almost too low to be heard. "Listen. Get to Raven. She's—she's the only one who can—take back the ship."
"But your leg—"
Bellamy shakes his head. He can hear, as Murphy can, the ringing metallic echo of footsteps coming for them.
"Raven. The ship. Go."
Murphy squares his shoulders, gives one decisive nod. "Raven," he repeats. He gives Bellamy's hand one quick, tight squeeze, as Bellamy lets go, and then he pulls himself to his feet again, jumps over Bellamy's legs, and keeps on running.
Raven. Where his instincts were leading him anyway.
He can hear the footsteps coming closer, closer, decisive and strong and steady but not running, not running like he's running—he barely stops himself in time to open the elevator doors. Then he throws himself inside and smashes the close door button so fast, he's sure he's broken the whole thing and doomed himself. Then he pushes the arrow going down.
Every moment the old elevator lurches down, and down, and he bounces on the balls of his feet and stares up at the ceiling, is a moment he's certain he's about to meet his quick and untimely death.
The trip down to the lower deck takes only seconds, feels like eternity.
When the elevator finally bumps to a stop and the doors slide away, he searches for something, anything, to jam into the door to keep it open. Nothing. Of course nothing. So he pulls off both his boots and shoves them into the space where the door will slide into the wall. He's under no illusion that they will keep the alien at bay, but at least, he hopes, he's bought himself and Raven some time.
Fuck, he hopes she has a firearm stashed away down there in her little shop of fucking horrors.
When the door to the lab doesn't immediately open, he pounds on it desperately. "Reyes! Reyes, come on—Raven! Open this motherfucking door, we have an alien on the loose—coming after me—come on—"
He's near tears for the first time in his entire adult life when the door finally slides away beneath his fists, and he stumbles forward over the threshold. All instinct, he manages to close the door behind him and throw the lock, then slam himself against the heavy metal slab, still breathing fast. His lungs are burning. His feet and hands and every stupid muscle in his body is aching, with exertion, with tension. And the lab itself is alight with such a sinister, such a ghostly, such a freakishly unnatural green glow that for a moment, he cannot even open his eyes.
Slowly, still catching his breath, he blinks them open, only a sliver at first, then all the way.
The glow is coming from the wall of plants, all alive now, or something like alive, all growing, their angry roots curling out over the edge of the tabletop and across the floor. Murphy walks toward them slowly. For one hollow, empty moment, he forgets everything else. He sees nothing else. He can think about nothing else.
"Pretty amazing, aren't they?" a voice behind him asks, and his heart jump starts, and he swears, ugly and loud.
"What the fuck, Raven—what are those?" He gestures wildly to the plants.
Raven is standing just behind him now, grinning, her hair wild and loose over her shoulders, her eyes bloodshot and red. She's standing too close. He feels her hands like skeleton hands at his waist and instinctively, he pulls away.
"Please, don't tell me you're one of them too—"
"One of what?"
"A—an alien. Like I've been trying to tell you—" He lets the words devolve into a frustrated scream. He wants to shake her, wants to shake himself until he wakes up from this dream. "Alien. In Clarke's body. Heading down here right now—Why are you not surprised?"
Raven shrugs. She slides closer to him again, hooks one finger into the waistband of his pajama pants. He tries to bat her away, but she persists; she's still smiling, an unhinged version of the blissful, beautiful expression she used to wear, when she'd come to some brilliant breakthrough in her work—
"I'm just not," she says.
And he understands. Like a snap of his fingers, he gets it. His own breathing has calmed, still too hard and the beating of his heart too strong, and yet he can hear, as if in echo, a staggered and uncertain breathing—
"Because you knew," he says. The calm, clear dawning of realization. He reaches for Raven's arms, death-grip of his fingers just above her elbows, walks her back toward the worktable again. These movements feel like the force of some other man, within him, and he’s so blinded with rage that he could almost believe that the other set of lungs is really his own. "You knew. You fucking knew—you brought it with us on purpose—"
"Murphy!" Raven lets herself be stopped up short by the table, still yanks at his hands to get herself free. Then she holds his hands and doesn’t let go. "You don't understand. You don't understand anything." Her voice rings maniacally on the verge of laughter. "It's fine! She's going to give Clarke her body back as soon as she's home. And in exchange... in exchange she gave us all this." She gestures, with their two hands together, at the lab, the glowing plants, the dark corners of the room Murphy will not let himself turn around to see.
"All this," he echoes, dull.
"The ability to bring back life," Raven whispers. Her eyes have grown wide, her grin deranged. He takes a step back from her and shakes his hands free of hers—not even his rage or his fear would make him touch her now.
"You're insane," he whispers. "You've gone off the fucking deep end—Raven. Come on. So you grew some freaky glowing plants. That's not the same as bringing back a person from the dead. There's no way this weird alien-Clarke could give you that. Maybe it would work for her people, but for humans—"
He can't stop talking, and Raven can't stop shaking her head. Far away, at the opposite end of the corridor, a low thump resounds, like something heavy dropping down to the floor.
"And that's her," he says, throwing his arm back to point toward the door. "That's her, she's coming, she has the ship—if you care about any of us who are actually alive, you will help me—"
"Murphy, you are not listening." She steps toward him again, grabs at his sides again and holds him and holds his gaze. "I'm trying to tell you that it worked. It did work."
He doesn't answer, too focused on the steady beat of footsteps rattling down the hall, too focused on his building panic, and how she will not listen to him—so finally Raven takes him by the shoulders and forces him to turn around. He sees the door first. The door that will open, soon, the last door between him and the ancient and alien being he has angered—and then he hears the breathing again, the breathing that is not his, and his eyes flick to the right.
Finn's frozen body, still thawing, is propped up against the wall. He's glowing an unnatural green, just like the plants. Breathing shaky, unsteady breaths, like he's still re-learning the workings of his lungs. His eyes are black and unfocused, but they seem to stare right into Murphy’s eyes.
"He's still—warming up," Raven's voice says, as if from a great distance, behind him. She sounds slightly apologetic, almost abashed. "But he'll get there. The progress on the plants was astounding."
The footsteps are outside the door now, Murphy's heart hammering at his throat. Thank fuck he remembered the lock. But it's pounding at the door, pounding as steadily as the footsteps did against the floor, and this being in Clarke's body has a strength that Clarke never had. He watches the metal start to warp beneath its fist.
"You just don't understand, Murphy," Raven says again. She sounds like she's pleading. He can't watch anymore. He closes his eyes. "You don't understand. She's just like us. She's just doing what she has to do to stay alive and find her people again. No different from us at all."
Murphy's hands shake, and he tells himself he needs to open his eyes.
But he can't.
He can't do anything but listen to the pounding at the door.
Just like us, he thinks, as if the mantra could save him. No different at all.