Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When Bellamy Blake is fourteen, he kills the girl he loves.

Her name is Clarke Griffin, his best friend since she showed up in his life at nine years old, mouth stained bright red from her cherry slushie. She’s the goddaughter of Jaha, his mom’s boss and his grandmom’s boss and his future boss, most likely. The real daughter of Doctor Griffin, the stern-faced woman that always comes to patch up Indra when the blowback’s bad, or his dad if the con goes wrong. Clarke’s much more than that, of course; she’s gorgeous and talented and rich and well-loved and important, and he kills her in the upstairs bedroom of his grandmother’s house.

His cousin finds him, standing over the body. His mother helps them hide it. They tell Indra, because it’s her house so it’s only fair, and she probably would have found out anyway. They don’t tell O—she’s just eleven when it happens, too young to understand that they’re not the good guys, anymore.

They bury her out behind the barn, an ancient broken-in tomb of a building. There are other things buried in the earth there—old pet dogs, stray cats, and maybe a farm horse or two. Probably other bodies, that Jaha didn’t want to deal with or didn’t want found. It doesn’t seem right to lump her in with them.

It doesn’t seem right that she’s gone at all, it’s surreal and he doesn’t even remember doing it. Just the feel of her blood on his hands, on his shoes. The knife in his hands and the cloudy blue of her eyes, and the grin on his face. (That’s the worst part.)

Actually, it’s all the worst part, and he can’t stop thinking about it.

Three years later and he’s kissing his ex-girlfriend at some party off-campus, and it’s Sunday night and they have class in the morning but he’s kissing her and she’s pawing at his jacket, and he’s pretty sure he’s spending the night—and he’s thinking about Clarke’s mouth, stained red and open. It’s morbid, and really fucking gross, and he has to pull away to throw up on the grass.

“Gross,” Roma makes a face and backs up.

Bellamy waves a hand, trying to say he’s not vomiting because of her, but he doubles back over before he gets the words out. Roma finds Jasper, who’s only slightly less drunk than him, and he helps him into the backseat of his refurbished hearse. Jasper’s parents run a lucrative funeral home—Jasper likes to joke that it’s the only business that’ll never run out of customers, since there’s always someone dying. Jasper had worried about the gas mileage, and managed to rework it so it runs on old donut grease. The inside always smells like fried food. It makes Bellamy nauseas—well, more nauseas.

“You’re not good to drive,” he accuses, face pressed into vinyl. He wouldn’t care that much, except Jasper’s a terrible driver when he’s sober, so Bellamy doesn’t even want to think of him driving drunk.

“I’m not gonna,” Jasper defends, sliding into the passenger seat. Bellamy peeks up to see Monty Green behind the wheel, which is a little surprising. He’s seen the kid around, but just barely; he’s new this year, and Bellamy didn’t know he and Jasper were friends.

Granted, he doesn’t actually know that much about his roommate’s personal life. He’d feel bad, but he’s probably doing Jasper a favor. People around him don’t tend to last very long.

Monty gets them home in one piece, and Bellamy’s stomach doesn’t feel quite so inside-out. He still has to lean pretty heavily on Jasper as they walk to their room, though. They live on the first floor, so it could be worse. Monty gives a quick wave goodnight, and pats Bellamy’s shoulder in awkward sympathy, before heading upstairs.

“He’s a good one,” he decides, and Jasper looks at him, a little amused.

“Dude,” he grins. “You are so wasted—and here I was, thinking you were all cool and collected. You had like, mysterious allure.”

“I’m still mysterious,” Bellamy argues, trying to wrestle himself out of his clothes. He gives up on his jeans, but manages to toss the shirt before collapsing face-down on his mattress. “Bet you don’t know what I’m gonna do next.”

“Uh, pass the fuck out?” Jasper hedges, changing into a pair of flannel pajamas with crazy-eyed spiders all over them. The pants are a few inches too short, like he got them a few Christmases ago and has since gone through a growth spurt. Bellamy squints up at the pattern of hokey sci-fi movie posters Jasper’s hung along the walls. The sixty-foot-woman is glaring down at him like he’s a bug on her shoe. Fitting.

“Lucky guess,” Bellamy slurs, and then passes out.

When Bellamy wakes up, it’s to the sound of metal on glass. At least, he thinks it’s metal. It might be rock. He squints at the neon red of his alarm clock—5:23 AM. It’s been barely four hours, and he can tell he’s still a little drunk. Something hits the window and clanks back to the ground outside. He chances a glance at Jasper, a lump of snoring blankets across the room. The boy slept through a fire alarm, once. Bellamy sighs, untangles his legs from the blankets, and stumbles over to the window.

He squints out through the dark gray-blue early morning air. There’s a girl outside. He opens the window, hissing at the sudden cold. “Yeah?”

“Bellamy?” the girl asks, sounding a little uncertain. She can’t be older than twelve. Bellamy frowns down at her—he knows her, he thinks. Or at least recognizes her, a little. Then he remembers.

“Charlotte?” His voice is a harsh whisper, and she winces at the sound. She’s Dax’s kid sister—Clarke’s cousin. She was barely ten when he last saw her, at her parents’ funeral. She’s gotten taller since then, and shaved off all her hair so her head resembles a fuzzy peach, but other than that she’s roughly unchanged. Still gangly. Still sad.

“Hey,” she fidgets, clearly uncomfortable. He bites back a wave of annoyance—why is she here if she clearly wishes she wasn’t? The answer’s pretty easy; she was forced.

“How’s it going?” He keeps his voice calm, trying to ease her into explaining herself. He lets his shoulders relax, tries a tired smile—easy going and approachable, but strong. He can be pretty convincing when he wants. “You need anything?”

“Uh, yeah,” she admits. “Dax and Murphy want to see you.” She falters a little, and then says quietly, “They’ve gotten worse.”

Bellamy frowns. Dax had always been an asshole, but Murphy at least had been harmless. He liked to play pranks on Bellamy when they were kids—switching his toys out for sticks and claiming he’d worked them, letting him think he wasn’t a non-worker, and then laughing and explaining the trick. But whenever the public school kids taunted him, calling his family criminals and evil, Murphy always had his back. They were family, after all. Family comes first.

“Worse how?” he asks, remembering how Dax used to bend Charlotte to her knees in the sand, until her skin was raw and bloody. Murphy sometimes stood there and watched.

Charlotte glances around nervously. It isn’t unfounded, he supposes; he may be just the non-worker brat of one of Jaha’s prostitutes, but Charlotte’s the ward of a mob doctor. That counts for something. “Just worse,” she says, not at all helpful. She pauses to consider him, tipping her head to the side like a dog. “Do you blame Jaha for your mom getting caught?” she wonders.

Bellamy starts, a little bewildered. His mom’s been in jail for the better part of two years now, even with Jaha’s best lawyers on her case. He doesn’t blame the mob boss; Aurora got caught because she got greedy, and didn’t cut and run when she should have. She’d wanted to win the game, and now she’s playing from prison. “No,” he shakes his head. “Why?”

“Murphy does,” Charlotte frowns. “Dax said he knew our parents wouldn’t make it out of that raid, but he sent them anyway.” She sounds angry now, and bitter—not at all like the little girl that cried on his sleeve at a funeral. “He should know how it feels, don’t you think?” she asks quietly, clearly not wanting an answer. He doesn’t give one. Why should he care if some little girl has a vendetta? He’s got his own demons to worry about.

“Look kid,” he says, trying for something between kind and firm, “Take that up with Jaha—if you want to teach the big boss a lesson, go ahead. But you shouldn’t just go around saying shit like that, or someone you don’t want will hear. Understand?” She frowns, but nods. “Good. Thanks for the message.” He waves a half-hearted goodbye, too exhausted to put any real effort in. He can feel the beginnings of a massive hangover that he’s not looking forward to. He fishes his phone from his jacket pocket, and texts Murphy.

you could’ve just texted.

so the brat woke u up then?

using a little girl to send your messages? gran would be disappointed.

so dont tell the old bat. whens ur last class?

I have debate club at 3

ill pick u up at 2:30

Bellamy sighs but turns his phone off, too tired to argue. He doesn’t bother asking why his cousin wants to meet him suddenly on a Monday afternoon—Murphy tries to avoid Bellamy at all costs. They don’t hate each other. They’re not even on bad terms.

But Murphy was the one to find him, giddy with killing over Clarke’s bloody form. So he gets it. He wouldn’t want to be around him much, either.

He meets Octavia for breakfast, ready for her to give him the cold shoulder after he refused to let her go to last night’s party. He knows she could have snuck out if she wanted, but the fact that she didn’t makes him ruffle her hair affectionately, even as she glares up at him. She’s fourteen, and clearly new to it, with long, thin limbs and long, dark hair. She’s pretty, but doesn’t really know how to wear her own skin. It’s adorable, and he grins stupidly down at her, snatching a bite of pancake from her plate.

“You look like shit,” she shoots in the irritated tone that means she’s actually worried. And also probably a little irritated. It pisses her off when he doesn’t take his own advice.

“Love you too,” he mumbles around his food. “I’m hanging out with Murphy after school,” he offers. She cuts her eyes at him.

“Let me guess; I can’t come?”

Bellamy shrugs. “I’ll tell him you say hi.”

“Tell him I say fuck you, asshole,” she demands. While Murphy and Bellamy have a non-relationship, Octavia and Murphy have a thick mutual dislike. It stems from when Murphy used to scalp all her dolls and knot their hair up in her pigtails while she slept.

“Will do,” he promises, steals another bite of pancake, and then stands to head to class. On his way out he catches sight of Monty, trying to sneak some extra bacon wrapped in paper towels. He gives him a nod, grateful for the night before, and slips through the door.

Phoenix Academy is a prep school, made up of rich kids whose parents are too busy to raise their children, and wealthy enough to pay someone else to do it for them. Bellamy and Octavia are there on a mixture of scholarships and the healthy salaries Jaha pay Indra, Aurora and Murphy—though most of his goes towards paying his way through Princeton Law. Bellamy’s a senior, which is only a little terrifying, and Octavia is a freshman, though you wouldn’t know it since she’d taken to the school pretty much instantly. She’s already got a ring of devoted fans, and a date to this year’s Prom. Bellamy has to hand it to the girl; she knows how to rule a high school.

Bellamy doesn’t really have friends, unless he counts Jasper, which he doesn’t, or maybe Roma, which she probably doesn’t. He gets invited to things like off-campus parties and bowling nights, because he’s the school bookie. He’d discovered pretty early on that the kids of Phoenix have money to burn, and the itch to spend it, which means they’ll bet on pretty much anything, and don’t usually make a fuss when they have to pay up. It’s not very legal, and it’s definitely against school rules, but. Beats working fast food.

He naps through most of his classes, and passes out in his room during study hall, until his alarm goes off at two. He packs a bag, because with Murphy he never knows if he’ll just want to play catch-up for fifteen minutes, or take an impromptu road trip to Atlantic City for the night.

His cousin doesn’t actually show up until ten minutes to three, because Murphy is notoriously late, and also very good at making you feel like you should be sorry about it. He swerves around to lean out the side window and growl, “You ready yet, asshole? Get the fuck in.”

“O says fuck you,” Bellamy chirps, buckling in so Murphy’s brand new Benz doesn’t nag him with its beeping.

“Yeah, well, fuck her,” Murphy says mildly. He’s smiling; profanity’s pretty close to affection for him. “And fuck you too,” he adds for good measure. “We’re getting pizza.”

He makes Bellamy pay, because he’s an asshole, and soon they’re sitting in a greasy booth in some greasy pizza place, getting grease all over their gloves as they split a sausage-and-tomato pie. “Where’s Dax?” Bellamy asks, wiping his gloves on a napkin. He hates that he can’t feel the texture, to be sure he’s gotten the oil all off.

Murphy smirks. “Why, you miss him? I’ll let him know.”

Bellamy rolls his eyes. He’s hated Dax ever since the incident with Charlotte in the sand. “Charlotte said you and Dax wanted to see me.” Murphy frowns.

“Did she? Weird. Well, just me today—sorry. You must be real disappointed.” He’s lying, but Bellamy doesn’t push it. He hasn’t actually hung out with his cousin like this—just pizza and conversation—in months. He’s not about to ruin it. He didn’t want to deal with Dax, anyway.

“How’s law school?” he hedges.

“Fucking annoying.” Murphy smirks. “The chicks are hot, though.” His answer’s always the same, and he always laughs. Bellamy just rolls his eyes again. “How’s yours—Rosa? Rita?”

“Roma,” Bellamy corrects. “We broke up.” He pauses. “Made out last night, though.”

“Good riddance,” Murphy decides without any real heat behind it. He probably doesn’t even remember what she looks like. “She wasn’t your type, anyway.”

“Oh yeah?” Bellamy crosses his arms, suddenly curious. “What’s my type, then?”

Murphy smirks. “Blondes,” he decides. “Fucking annoying ones. And short.”

Bellamy goes rigid. He means Clarke, because Murphy can’t resist walking up to a boundary and crushing it with a few words, then kicking the remains just because.

He’d brought a friend home—some classmate of his from Princeton, back when he was just a freshman, when Bellamy and Clarke were fourteen. His name was Finn, and he was funny, and nice, and he’d winked at Clarke when he’d met her, and kissed her hand like some fucking knight in armor. Murphy had just watched it all with his condescending smirk, eyeing Bellamy like it was a game, and he was waiting for him to play his part. Bellamy just went downstairs to sulk and watch Death Note, which was why Clarke was over in the first place.

She’d gone upstairs with Finn. He learned later that Finn had fingered her in his parent’s bathroom—she’d told him, because he was her best friend, and she’d been excited about it, and she hadn’t known he was half in love with her.

Later, they found out Murphy only knew Finn because he was dating Murphy’s roommate, Raven. Clarke didn’t really have time to be upset about it. Bellamy killed her later that week.

“You talk to your mom lately?” Murphy asks, licking the pizza crumbs from his gloves. Bellamy sighs.

“You know I haven’t,” he accuses. Aurora calls Murphy at three times a week, and if she doesn’t, she tries for Bellamy or Octavia. Octavia and Murphy usually pick up. Bellamy just lets it go to voicemail; he and his mom do better with recordings.

Murphy shrugs. “She’s getting out soon. For sure, this time.”

Bellamy shrugs back. He’d known it was going to happen—two years was already pushing it, for Aurora. She has trouble staying in one place. Murphy has been managing her appeals since she was found guilty, so it stands to reason he’d know the moment one went through. “What do you think she’s going to do?” Bellamy wonders, “When she gets out?”

“Meddle,” Murphy laughs sharply. “You know her. She’ll be halfway across the world with some billionaire in her pocket, within two weeks. Bet you.”

“Nah,” Bellamy grins. “Not with those odds.” He may not be a worker, but he knows how to add.

Murphy’s a luck worker—it’s the most common, passed from his dad. Octavia’s a worker too, of dreams. When they were kids, she’d hold Bellamy’s hand until they fell asleep, and have surreal adventures in whatever dreamscape she imagined. Usually there were lots of fluorescent flowers, and butterflies, and a Pegasus named Oceana.

Aurora’s an emotions worker. With one press of her finger, she can make anyone fall in love with her, or give them a depression so crippling they want to die. She has rows and rows of beautiful gloves, different colors and materials and lengths, all with a single slit through a single finger, so she can slip skin against skin in a handshake, or a graze of the neck. She’s usually very smooth with it, but years of blowback have made her somewhat unpredictable. Lately, she’s been just as likely to fill a person up with adoration, or reduce them to a blubbering mess.

Bellamy isn’t sure what sort of lasting effects Murphy’s work has had on him. He works part-time for Jaha, and Bellamy isn’t naïve enough to think the mob boss has him going around, spreading only good luck. But he’s never seen Murphy trip while crossing the street, or get a paper cut, or crash his car. Octavia doesn’t really work anymore, not since she was a kid, so her sleep schedule’s pretty average these days, though when they were little and she still used her curse like a game, he’d find her awake in the middle of the night, watching adult swim, unable to get to sleep. And Indra’s blowback is pretty evident, in the missing spaces in her gloves, where six of her fingers should be. A rotted digit for each life she took. Bellamy learned at a young age not to stare at them.

Bellamy, of course, has never suffered through blowback, good or bad. He used to think it’d be worth it, to be a worker. He still sort of does.

Being the only non-worker in a family full of them meant he got shut out of a lot of family meetings. He wasn’t ever included in the plans, or asked for an opinion. He’d walk in a room, and suddenly cousins would stop talking, or Murphy and his friends would clear out. His mother would change the subject. Indra would offer abruptly to make coffee.

Only Clarke, and Wells by proxy, ever really tried to include him—and when they couldn’t, they’d shut themselves with him in the attic and play board games, or run out to the barn and poke around in the piles of trash and antiques, looking for treasure. Wells could only come to the house three or four times through the summer, but Clarke soon became a fixture at the Blake residence. Sometimes Octavia would run after them, too young to really be anything but obnoxious, but Clarke never turned her away.

Octavia, like everyone else, thinks Clarke was kidnapped, or killed, or ran away. Bellamy wonders what his sister would do if she knew the missing friend that she cried for was buried right in their backyard. She’d probably hate him. God knows he does.

Murphy doesn’t offer to let Bellamy spend the night tucked away in his dorm like a stray cat, instead dropping him back off at the Academy sometime before sunset. Bellamy has one foot out the car door when Murphy grabs his arm. “You still talk to the Prince?” he asks. He means Wells; it’s a stupid nickname he and Dax used to use to make the boy uncomfortable.

Wells was nervous and shy as a kid, and Bellamy was sort of awkward, which meant Clarke was the one to lead their little trio in their childish warfare against the older boys. They’d wear hockey masks and dig trenches through Indra’s attempt at a garden, armed with pebbles and bits of sea glass picked up from the boardwalk. It only really lasted until they got bored, or until Dax filled their trenches with fire ants, or Indra saw the mess they’d made of her front yard.

“Not really,” Bellamy shrugs. It turned out that without Clarke gluing them all together, he and Wells didn’t actually have much in common. They hung out a few times after she disappeared, but her absence was like a wall between them; they just reminded each other that she wasn’t there. “Why?”

Murphy shakes his head. “No reason. Just wondering. Bye, kid.” He peels off through the lot without another word, and Bellamy stares after him. Murphy hadn’t even cared about Wells when he was at their house every other week—why would he start, now?

Bellamy’s crossing the quad, towards his dorm, when someone calls his name. He turns with a groan, finding Maya Vie walking towards him. She has strands of hemp braided through her hair, and her cloth messenger bag slung over a shoulder. Buttons like Workers Rights! and Not all Magic is Black line the straps. There are notes in blue pen scrawled all over her wrists and the backs of her hands, things like 16 yo, and read journal, and you are Maya, which seems a little strange, but no weirder than the rest of her.

Maya’s dad Vincent is pretty well-known in political circles. He’s one of the only open workers, let alone in politics, and is pushing legislation to legalize curse working, as well as several separate bills regarding workers’ rights. He recently gave a speech to the senate, where he acknowledged his own luck working ability. It was well-written, and brave, and very, very stupid.

“Hey, Bellamy,” Maya says, as evenly as she says everything. He’s not sure he’s ever seen her less than put-together. “Got a minute?”

“Actually, I’m kind of late,” he says, hoping he sounds the right amount of apologetic. Judging by her look of skepticism, he didn’t hit the mark. “For a meeting,” he adds.

“Oh?” Maya asks. “With who?”

“Uh, Monty Green,” Bellamy tosses. It’s probably not the best plan, but Monty’s the only person he’s sure will be in his room at the moment, which makes the lie sort of plausible. “We’re going over Mythology notes.”

“I didn’t know you knew Monty,” Maya says, and Bellamy’s heart sinks. Of course Maya knows Monty—he should have known. He should have said Jasper; he’s pretty sure Maya doesn’t know Jasper. Jasper mainly hangs out in their dorm, working on special effects props for the drama department. “I’ll walk with you.”

“Great,” Bellamy mutters, and they turn towards the dorm together. It’s quiet between them at first, and he’s just begun to think she might take mercy on him, when Maya speaks again.

“So have you reconsidered joining HEX at all?” she asks. Bellamy sighs; Maya has been badgering him about joining her father’s cause, and the small club for worker-nonworker-relations since she’d found out who his family was, their sophomore year.

“Sorry, can’t,” he bites out. He can only say no so many times, in so many ways, before he gets snappy with her. “I’m pretty busy this year.”

“Debate club only meets on Mondays and Thursdays,” Maya points out helpfully. “Track is Tuesdays and Wednesdays. HEX is Fridays only, so. I’m sure you could manage.” She’s nothing less than kind about it, but her persistence sets his teeth on edge. Bellamy may not be a worker, but his entire family works for Jaha, which means they pretty much depend on the black market of curse working.

“Sorry,” he says again, a little firmer this time. Maya sighs, but stays otherwise silent until they reach Monty’s door. Bellamy almost didn’t know which one was his, but then he saw the white board covered in doodles of a bean sprout hitting a cartoon zombie in the head with a baseball bat. He knocks, praying the kid will play along.

Realistically, Bellamy knows nothing will really happen if Maya catches him in the lie, but. He hates being caught. It’s genetic.

Monty doesn’t open the door; his roommate does. Bellamy doesn’t know his name, but he’s seen him around—he’s enormous, probably older than him, and he’s wearing the wrestling team’s sweatshirt, so it’s a safe bet he’s on the team. He looks down on them, confused. “Maya?”

“Hey Lincoln,” Maya says sweetly. “I just wanted to check on LKM.” Bellamy eyes them both suspiciously; acronyms only ever mean you have something to hide.

“LKM?” he asks, and Lincoln looks worriedly to Maya, who seems completely nonchalant.

“Little Killing Machine,” she shrugs, like it was obvious. “Their cat.” Bellamy turns back to Lincoln, trying to glimpse the room around the large man’s shoulder.

“You have a cat?” Pets were against school regulations, but, well—so was gambling. Still, hiding a live cat in their room is risky. He remembers Monty at breakfast that morning, pocketing a wad of hot bacon.

“We’re watching her for a friend,” Monty calls out from somewhere Bellamy can’t see. He appears beside his roommate a moment later, in loose gym shorts and a shirt that says THE WALRUS IS LIKE A VAMPIRE BUT AWESOME. He looks between Maya and Bellamy, clearly confused, but too polite to ask about it.

“She cornered me on the quad,” Bellamy shrugs, stepping into the room like he’s done it a million times. “I’m here to go over the Mythology notes.”

“Oh,” Monty says, still confused, but trying his hardest not to let it show. “Right. The notes. For mythology.”

Bellamy can’t help smirking. “Never run a con, kid.”

Monty huffs. “We’re the same age,” he mutters, but he gestures to his desk chair as he digs through his bag. “Go ahead and sit; I have to hunt down those notes, that I totally took.”

Bellamy watches as Maya plucks a piece of ham from her bag and crouches under Lincoln’s bunk, offering the meat to the shadows underneath it. There’s a flash of movement, and then a cat slinks out into the light. It licks at its muzzle a little, and then sits straight and proper and stares straight at him with its ice blue eyes. Its coat is pure white, with traces of mud staining its paws a little.

“LKM?” Bellamy guesses, holding out a hand for her to sniff. She bites down hard on his fingers, and Lincoln frowns.

“She’s usually very nice,” he assures him. Bellamy sticks his bleeding finger in his mouth, as the cat pretends not to care about him. She’s beautiful.

“It’s okay,” Bellamy shrugs. “Animals hate me; always have. Why do you call her Killing Machine?”

“She killed a mouse her first night here,” Monty says proudly, pulling a notebook from the web of papers and books in his bag.

“I wanted to name her Princess,” Maya says sadly. Bellamy snorts, but the cat only looks at him sharply, as if daring him to argue.

“You know what, I’m sorry, you’re right,” he decides. “Princess definitely suits her better.”

“Princess Killing Machine,” Monty coos, and the cat purrs agreeably, rubbing up against his ankles. Bellamy feels the familiar pang of jealousy he’d always have when the neighborhood strays would run up to Octavia, Wells and Clarke but never him. Like they could smell something was different about him, and not worth approaching.

“So what did you want to go over?” Monty asks, visibly fighting a laugh. Bellamy shrugs convincingly.

“Whatever, I guess. Aeneas?”

Maya stands from where she’d been crouched, scratching Princess Killing Machine’s chin. “I’d better go,” she decides. “I’ll see you boys at dinner.” Lincoln walks her out, and Monty drops his notebook to raise a brow at Bellamy.

“She followed me,” Bellamy mutters. “She keeps pestering me about HEX. I didn’t know you two were friends.”

“Maya’s great,” Monty says a little defensively. “She really cares about making a difference in the world.”

“That’s fine,” Bellamy shrugs. “She can make as many differences as she wants—just leave me out of all of them.”

“Why don’t you want to join HEX?” Lincoln wonders, and Bellamy squints up at him. He wonders if Lincoln might be a worker—he thought he’d known all the worker students at school, but if Lincoln is from upstate New York, or the Hamptons like some of the other rich kids, odds are Bellamy wouldn’t know either way.

“Not all workers are pro-legalizing,” Bellamy shrugs. “I’m not a worker, so I don’t care either way, to be honest, but. My, uh, family wouldn’t be too happy about it.”

Lincoln frowns. “You should stand for something,” he argues softly. Bellamy shrugs again. He just showed up and sat down in this guy’s dorm; he’s not about to pick a fight with him, especially over politics. He hears enough about proposition two and worker history from Indra.

“So I’m guessing you don’t actually have any questions about Aeneas?” Monty says.

Bellamy smirks. “Mythology’s my best class,” he admits, standing. He offers the cat a last, lingering glance—it’s the eyes, he thinks. They remind him of Clarke’s. “See you at dinner,” he mutters, shakily slipping out the door.

Bellamy finds Octavia in the cafeteria at their usual table. He sees the moment she sees him, offering an apology to the group of kids around her before they all pick up their lunches and move to a different bench. Bellamy sits in their place.

“You didn’t have to shoo them away,” he says, pleased. Octavia rolls her eyes and trades him half his French fries for a few mozzarella sticks.

“I don’t want them realizing I’m related to such a loser,” she teases, mouth full.

“Joke’s on you,” Bellamy shoots back, “It’s genetic.”

“On your side of the family, maybe.” He watches her eyes slit over his shoulder, as she clamps down a smile. He turns to follow her sightline, only to find Lincoln just walking in, glancing over at them.

“You know Lincoln?” Bellamy asks with a frown. Lincoln is definitely older than him, and bigger. Typical of his sister to find the boy least likely to be intimidated by him.

“You know Lincoln?” Octavia asks, horrified. Bellamy tries not to be offended. “We have study hall together. I’ve gone with him to a few HEX meetings.” She juts out her chin defiantly, ready for him to argue with her.

“You went to a HEX meeting?” Bellamy asks, too surprised to be very angry. He’d meant it, when he said he didn’t care either way. But he knows their family won’t feel the same. “More than once? You didn’t die of boredom the first time?”

“It’s actually really interesting,” Octavia says slowly, as if testing the water. She’s clearly surprised he’s not putting up a fight, which is kind of amusing. He may pitch a fit about her trying to go to some kegger on a Sunday night, but he’s not about to force her not to have an opinion on her own future. He just wishes she’d felt like she could tell him.

“Okay,” he shrugs, and then grins wickedly. “Maybe I’ll join you next time.” Octavia cuts her eyes at them, jabbing a mozzarella stick through the air, threateningly.

“Don’t you dare, Bell,” she warns, and takes a vicious bite. “What did the asswipe want, anyway?” She means Murphy.

“Pizza and the pleasure of my company,” Bellamy smirks. “He asked about Wells.”

“Weird,” Octavia hums. “You ever think about Clarke?” Bellamy freezes, clears his throat, and tries to keep his breathing steady. She doesn’t know, he reminds himself.

“Why are you thinking about Clarke?”

Octavia gives him a strange look. “I always think about Clarke,” she says. “Where she might be, what might have happened, if she’s happy, if she’ll come back. I still sort of expect to find a post card from her, from somewhere like Djibouti or Greenland or something, you know?”

“Yeah,” Bellamy croaks, and wolfs down his dinner so he won’t have to speak.

Bellamy sneaks Jasper half a tuna sandwich and some mozzarella sticks because even though the kid eats an insane amount of calories each day, he nearly always forgets to grab dinner when he’s in his prop-making zone. He’s recently gotten attached to the idea of mini explosives, in all shapes and sizes. Bellamy’s pretty sure that one day soon Jasper will cut the wrong wire, and he’ll wake up right as their dorm room explodes.

“Did you know Monty and Lincoln have a cat in their room?” Bellamy asks as Jasper mows through his sandwich.

“Like a real one?” Jasper asks around a mouthful of tuna. He licks some off his thumb, considering. The goggles rest crooked on his head, and with each movement, Bellamy’s sure they’ll slide off and crash to the floor. “Huh. Weird.”

“Princess Killing Machine,” Bellamy says. “Apparently she killed a mouse.”

“Badass,” Jasper decides, inhaling the mozzarella sticks. “Better hope Kane doesn’t find her.”

Marcus Kane is the dean of the Academy, a stern hawk-eyed man with hair more gray than brown, and weathered skin. He prowls the halls like a snake, always coiled and ready to spring.

“Yeah,” Bellamy decides, and rolls over to sleep.

He wakes to the sound of scratching, this time from the door. Jasper is dead to the world, as expected, so Bellamy heaves himself up and wanders across the room.

Princess Killing Machine is sitting just outside the door, paw held up in midair, poised to scratch. Bellamy stares down at her dumbly for a moment. “Hey,” he says. “What do you want?” He’s still groggy from sleep, so he doesn’t bother questioning why he’s talking to a cat. She stares up at him and yowls, gives his leg a quick swipe, and then races down the hall.

“Hey!” Bellamy hisses after the cat. She stops at the end of the hall, looking ghostly in the dim light, and looks back at him. Like she’s waiting for him. Bellamy glances back at Jasper, still unconscious, then sighs and heads after the stupid cat.

“How’d you even get out?” he mutters, crossing over towards the animal. She pads on around the corner, at a slow enough pace that he can easily follow. She’s definitely leading him somewhere, and he knows cats sometimes do this; they like to show off. She probably killed another mouse or something, and is bringing him to the crime scene so he can compliment her murder skills.

Princess Killing Machine leads him up to the dorm’s side door, propped open with a chunk of cinder block. She slips easily through the crack, and Bellamy follows; he’s come this far, after all. His feet are bare against the cold, wet grass, and he fights a shiver. He should have grabbed a sweatshirt or something.

The cat pads across the courtyard, up to the dorm next door, and then she looks up at the roof and back to Bellamy, meowing imploringly. Bellamy glances up where she’d been staring.

There’s a boy on the roof.

He’s dark skinned, dark haired, in blue flannel pajamas and no shirt. Like he’s just sleepwalking. Bellamy stares up at him dumbly for a moment, squinting through the pale light.

“Wells?” he asks, and then louder so the boy can hear him.

Wells turns to look down at Bellamy, dazed and groggy. “Bellamy?” he calls back. “What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” Bellamy says. Their voices are echoing in the silence of early morning, and he sees a light in the dorm flick on. “Why are you on the roof?”

Wells glances around, like he hadn’t known what he was standing on. “She’s dead because of me,” he admits, staring down at Bellamy sadly.

“Who is?” The cat is yowling again, frantically pacing between Bellamy’s legs, and he swats her away.

“Clarke,” Wells says, grave. “I’m why she’s gone. It’s my fault.”

“No it’s not,” Bellamy argues. He’s starting to understand why Wells is on the roof, why he’s so close to the edge. And getting closer.

Kids are filing out of the dorm, now, staring up and shouting. Someone screams. A few yell for the teachers. Phones are being whipped out, taping it. Some are trained on Bellamy, and he tries not to flinch. He can’t tear his eyes from Wells, whose big toes are now hanging over the gutter.

Someone shouts “Jump!” and Bellamy fights the urge to find them, and beat them to a pulp. The cat hisses.

“My father blames me,” Wells says, “Abby blames me. Everyone does. It’s my fault.”

“I don’t blame you,” Bellamy shouts. “You didn’t do anything wrong!” Wells smiles hollowly down at him.

“You were always a good one, Bellamy Blake,” Wells says, and then jumps.

More screams, and the teachers are here now, asking questions, forcing students back inside. Flashes from camera phones, and the cat is yowling—crying—now, shuddering against Bellamy’s shin. He snatches her up before the teachers can notice, and stuffs her under his shirt. He’s still mostly dazed by the thought of Wells, the sight of him on that roof and then suddenly not, as he fights his way through the crowd of students and back to his room. The cat is squirming under his shirt, digging her claws into his skin until he grunts, and he knows he’s doing a shitty job of hiding her, but no one stops him.

Jasper’s still asleep when he shuts the door and drops the cat down on his bed. She’s still crying, softer now, and burrows into his blankets. He curls up around her, skin against fur, and thinks back to Wells’ eyes—glazed and confused. Like he was still sleeping. Like he didn’t know it was real.

In the end, someone told Headmaster Kane that Bellamy had seen the whole thing, had even held a conversation with Wells. He sits through an uncomfortable pseudo-interrogation in the headmaster’s office, where he tells him he grew up with Wells Jaha, but hadn’t seen him in years, and wasn’t sure why he’d chosen to take his life at Phoenix Academy.

He finds Octavia waiting for him outside the door to his dorm; girls weren’t allowed in without an escort. She’s pacing worriedly until she sees him, and then she scowls.

“What the hell, Bellamy?” she hisses, but Bellamy just shakes his head and opens the door for her. She follows him to his room, where Jasper is sitting at his desk, looking mildly panicked.

He glances shyly at Octavia before turning to Bellamy. “Hey man, uh,” he rubs his neck, awkward. “So I’ve been getting these emails pretty much nonstop—did you, uh, talk some dude to suicide this morning?”

“What?” Bellamy asks, genuinely surprised. He’d known his classmates would have a lot to say about Wells’ death, but he didn’t think they’d outright lie. “No, of course not.” He turns to Octavia, grim. “Wells Jaha jumped off the roof of a dorm this morning.”

“Wait, what?” Jasper sits up. “Jaha—like, black-market-curse-crime-boss Jaha? That Jaha?”

“His son,” Bellamy corrects. Jasper may not be a worker, but even the non-workers of South Jersey know Thelonious Jaha. “We grew up together.”

“You grew up together,” Jasper repeats, incredulous. “With a crime lord’s son. Right. Okay. Good to know.” He looks between the siblings, clearly upset but unsure who or what to be upset with.

“What did he say?” Octavia asks, voice soft. She was small when Wells still came around the Blake house, but he was always kind to her, and offered to let her in on their games. Bellamy often refused, and even Clarke sometimes lost patience with little Octavia, but Wells never did. “They said you were talking to him.”

“He was pretty out of it,” Bellamy shrugs, glancing around the room. The cat was still asleep on his bed when the teacher had come to fetch him for Kane, but now there’s no sign of her. “He kept saying it was his fault that Clarke was gone.” He didn’t repeat Wells’ last words. He doesn’t want to lie.

Octavia sucks in a sharp breath. “There was a theory that he helped her run away,” she muses. “I didn’t think he would.”

“He would’ve,” Bellamy says. “If she’d asked him. He’d have done anything.” It doesn’t need to be said that Bellamy would have done anything, too. “He didn’t, though. He didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance—he was just out of it.”

“Sorry,” Jasper interrupts. “But who’s Clarke?”

“Clarke Griffin,” Octavia says. “Jaha’s goddaughter. Bell’s best friend when we were kids.”

Jasper blinks and stares at Bellamy. “Dude, who are you?”

“Nobody,” Bellamy shakes his head. “Where’s the cat?”

“Yeah, thanks for the heads up on that,” Jasper sniffs. “She threw up on me.” He glances over at his storm trooper duvet, in a crumpled heap in the corner. Octavia makes a face. “Monty showed up looking for her.”

“You have a cat?” Octavia asks, glaring at them. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Monty has a cat,” Bellamy corrects. “I cat-sit for him sometimes.” Octavia’s eyes narrow but she doesn’t call him out. He’s not sure how to explain being led to Wells by some white cat, or how she sounded like she was crying when the boy jumped. He’s not really sure what to make of it, himself.

“You hate cats,” Octavia argues. Bellamy rolls his eyes.

“Monty’s persuasive,” he shrugs. “Kane’s probably gonna want to talk to you, about Wells.” He turns to Jasper. “You too, maybe, since you’re my roommate. I told him you sleep like a coma patient, but. He might ask you, anyway.”

“What should I say? Did he have the heebeegeebies?” Jasper asks, clearly interested in whatever sort of delinquency they might be up to, despite himself. HGB is the abbreviation of some long medical term that means “worker,” which led to the nickname heebeegeebies. It’s a stupid name. Bellamy rolls his eyes again.

“The truth,” he says. “That you were asleep, and you don’t know anything, whether he was worked or not.” He pauses. “Don’t mention the cat. Jasper looks altogether disappointed by the normalcy of this plan.

“What about you?” Octavia asks, fierce. “Are you okay?” Bellamy gives a small smile and hooks an arm around her neck to drag her in. She smells like cinnamon and vanilla—she was probably baking with her roommate again.

“Yeah,” he sighs. “Sorry—people will probably be asking a lot of questions today.”

“I don’t care,” Octavia growls, voice muffled by his button down shirt. “Fuck them, I don’t care about them, I care about you.” She pulls away to glare up at him. “Be careful.” She opens the door and steps out. “And I want to see the cat next time,” she demands, slamming the door shut behind her.

“Your sister is mildly terrifying,” Jasper mutters. He used to have a crush on Octavia, back when she was still new at being a freshman, and he thought he might be able to work the older-student-guide angle. Before he realized Bellamy would strangle him with his own tie if he so much as touched her hair.

“Don’t let her hear you say that,” Bellamy warns mildly. “She can smell fear; she’ll use it to make you her slave.”

He gets called into the counselor’s office halfway through Calculus. Dr. Tsing is a severe woman, who clearly went to school for several years to learn her trade, and is a little bitter about ending up at a glorified high school. She asks Bellamy a lot of questions about his childhood, all of which he answers with vague things like, I played outside a lot, and I loved my parents but sometimes we didn’t get along. She asks about Wells and he says, we were really little, I don’t remember too much, and she asks about the suicide but he just says, it still doesn’t feel real, and then shuts up. He gives her next to nothing to work with, and he can’t tell if her irritation is with him for his un-cooperation, or with the situation in general. In the end, she scribbles down some notes, signs her name illegibly, and hands the slip to him curtly.

“You’ll be on bereavement leave for the next week,” she explains in a huff. “You can come back on Monday, and I’ll reevaluate you to decide whether or not you’re ready to resume classes.”

Bellamy takes the note in a daze. “Bereavement leave?” he echoes. He’d thought that was only for family members, like grandfathers or great-aunts. “But I’m not sad.” It’s a stupid thing to say, but. He can’t imagine being away from Phoenix for an entire week. He’s made it a point to never stay more than two days with his family; it keeps him sane, and it keeps them satisfied. Any more, and things could get messy. He’s not even sure who to call.

“Grief shows its face in more ways than one,” Dr. Tsing says automatically, like she’s reading from a teleprompter. He wonders where she heard the line; it sounds like something from a fortune cookie, or one of the pamphlets in an optometrist’s office.

“Right,” Bellamy sneers, stuffing the note in his pocket and marching out the door. It’s not his best move, but. He’s pissed, and a little sleep deprived. And now he’s being kicked out of school for a week.

He asks Jasper to watch the books and take the bets while he’s gone. His roommate seems all too happy to finally be involved in something illicit—it’d be cute, if it didn’t convince Bellamy he wouldn’t be able to hack it. But who else can he ask? So he shows Jasper where he keeps the mead notebook, taped up above his closet door, right in plain sight, and he can tell Jasper’s impressed that he never noticed. Most people don’t; why look just in front of your face, for something that’s supposed to be hidden?

He can’t explain how he calculates the odds, because it’ll take too long, but he shows him the spreadsheets, and how to tally, and how to add up who gets how much, or who owes the house. He makes him promise not to accept credit.

“Yeah, I don’t see one of those swipe machines around,” Jasper joked, but Bellamy shook his head.

“They’ll want you to take their card, and buy something of equal value to what they owe. Don’t do it. It’ll just look like you stole their card, and that’s exactly what they’ll tell their parents.”

Jasper, appropriately warned, nods. Bellamy stuffs a few pairs of jeans and sweatshirts in an old duffel that smells like mothballs. He packs up his school books, just in case. He’s hoping they’ll let him back in early, on good behavior or something. Like prison, but reversed.

Kane calls Murphy to pick him up, which is strange. He hadn’t even known the school had Murphy’s number. Octavia’s in class, and they must not have told her about his leaving, otherwise she’d be there to see him off. So he sends her a quick text, and slides into Murphy’s Benz, tossing his bag in the back.

“It’s not every day you get permission to play hooky,” Murphy smirks.

“It’s not every day someone dies,” Bellamy says, leaning his head against the cool glass as they drive. He’s suddenly very, very tired.

“Yeah about that,” Murphy says, sounding apathetic as always, but tinged with something like nerves. It’s enough to make Bellamy anxious; Murphy doesn’t get nerves. “You’re spending the week with Indra.”

Bellamy groans. He loves his grandmother, but she’s a hard, stern woman that believes in kids earning their supper. If he’s staying with her, it means he’ll be spending the next week sifting through decades’ worth of junk in his old childhood home, which also serves as the neighborhood dumpster.

“Jaha’s looking for you, Bell,” Murphy snaps. “He knows you had something to do with his kid’s death. So you’re staying with Indra. It’s just a week—try not to pussy out, or anything.”

Bellamy feels his blood run cold. Jaha’s looking for him. It doesn’t matter how long he spends at Indra’s—it’s just a matter of time until the mob boss catches up to him. Jaha always finds what he’s looking for.

Except for Clarke.

Bellamy wonders if the school knew about Jaha, if that’s why they kicked him out. They didn’t want another death on their campus. It may be a little unrealistic, but. Growing up in a family of conmen, Bellamy’s prone to paranoia.

Walden is like a graveyard where everyone has already bought their plots and built their houses on top of them, just waiting to die. Almost everyone in town is a worker, and most are old and retired. The big three worker families all came into power sometime in the thirties, right after the ban on working was put in place. They all settled down along the boardwalk, and then stayed there. Tsing, Trigadeskru, and Jaha—although Jaha runs most of Jersey, so he’s really the only one Bellamy ever thought mattered.

Murphy drives him straight to their childhood home, just as crooked and grimy as he remembered it. He thinks about asking to crash at Murphy’s apartment, but then he’d have to see Raven, which. It’s probably not a good idea.

She’d shown back up at the house, after finding out about Finn and Clarke. She’d been looking for Clarke, but Bellamy had killed her weeks ago by then. So instead she asked him to fuck her in the upstairs bathroom, and he did, wondering if this was the part of wall that Clarke had been pressed against that day.

He asked Raven if it helped, if she felt better. She said no, and then don’t call me, and left.

Murphy doesn’t bother getting out of the car, just gives Bellamy a taunting sneer and Indra a curt wave, and then slides back onto the highway. The drive is so thick with sludge that the Benz had begun sinking where its wheels stood. Bellamy has to pick his feet up with each step towards the front porch, a bunch of rotted boards that lean towards the ground like wilting plants. The steps were eaten away by termites years ago, so three cinderblocks took their place. Bellamy scrapes his feet on the concrete as he goes.

“You look like you could use a drink,” Indra observes, leading him in through the door.

The inside of the house is just as he remembers—cluttered piles of moth-eaten sweaters and acid-wash jeans; boots with the soles worn out; paperbacks crumbled and swollen with rainwater; coffee-stained teacups and chipped plates; boxes and boxes of gloves, all lengths and sizes and different variations of shabby. If someone were to cut the Blake house straight through the middle, they could read their history like the rings of a tree. All their family secrets in towering piles and cardboard boxes.

Indra makes him a Turkish coffee—with a little of her trademark brandy, the expensive old kind in label-less Vaseline glass—and lights an unfiltered cigarillo. Bellamy goes upstairs to drop off his bag on the bed he slept in as a child. He can tell already it’s too small for him; his legs will hang off the edge uncomfortably. He’ll probably end up on the couch, which is fine; he prefers the couch, anyway. The room is otherwise intact—stacks of old Star Wars books and a few VHS’s he and Clarke used to watch on the basement television. The old dresser covered in holographic stickers and missing half its knobs, with shoelaces tied through the holes like makeshift handles. The walls are painted a dusty gray he saw in a decorating magazine he saw once, that he thought would make him seem more grown up. He can see the patch of wall that O had been in charge of painting, where the brushstrokes are erratic and uneven, and there’s a spot of white from when she got bored and left. Clarke had drawn little cartoon dragons all over the baseboards.

He crouches down by the windowsill, where they’d all carved their initials into the wood with Clarke’s nail file. He traces over the WJ, and his finger comes away covered in dust.

“There are cats in the barn,” Indra says when he comes downstairs. She waves towards the kitchen window with her cigarillo, sorting through a box of old belt buckles one-handed. She’s missing both index fingers, so she holds her cigarettes with her middle and ring fingers. It shouldn’t look like a threat.

Bellamy has to lean his face close to the window to see through the grime. There’s a little black-and-white kitten hopping through the weeds and tall grass. Octavia calls them tuxedo cats, because of their white bibs. He’s glad she isn’t here; she’d spend all week trying to convince Indra to keep it.

The second cat looks on from its tree stump throne, just a blur of white in the distance.

There’s a knock at the front door, and Indra leaks smoke from her nostrils in irritation. Bellamy goes to tell whoever it is to leave; there’s a limited number of options, here in Walden. Mostly they get a lot of traveling salespeople who don’t know any better, and a few traveling gypsies looking for day-to-day work.

He opens the door to find Old Man Diggs looking distrustfully at the splintering wood beneath his feet. Old Man Diggs grew up with Indra, and has been a fixture of Walden longer than Bellamy’s been alive. He doesn’t have any children, but he’s played the role of uncle to most of the neighborhood kids. There’s a rumor that he helped child Jaha figure out his own curse, back in the day. He runs a corner store two blocks from everything in town, selling cheap protection charms and energy drinks and cigarettes.

“Ma’am Blake’s on the phone,” he grunts, looking up at Bellamy through narrowed eyes. No one’s really clear on what Diggs’ curse is, other than something that involves age. Years of working for Jaha, and Jaha’s father before him, has left him with withered skin and a permanent squint, though he’s just as old as Indra. He’s looked like an old man for as long as Bellamy’s known him.

Diggs’ store also has the only still working payphone in the whole town, possibly the county. In theory, Aurora Blake shouldn’t be able to call another payphone from the one in her prison, but she was quick to find a way around that. She just has to call Murphy or Anya, and they’ll accept the charges and then three-way call someone else. She shies away from cell phones, convinced some dark corner of the government has all of them bugged. She might be right.

Bellamy calls out where he’s going to Indra, and then follows Diggs back to his store. They don’t small talk. Diggs hasn’t been one for gossip since he officially retired, a few years back.

The payphone is in its own separate station, a few feet from the store, and Bellamy picks up the familiar weight of the receiver. “Hey, mom. Indra says hi.”

Aurora snorts at the joke. Indra likes her only a little more than she likes Murphy. He thinks it has something to do with Octavia’s dad, but Bellamy’s never asked. “I’m sure she does,” she says, and he can practically see the smirk on her pretty face. He may not totally trust his mom, but he still loves her. “I heard you had a visit from that little Wells boy,” she says, completely nonchalant, like she’s not talking about the death of a kid she babysat each summer. “Such a shame; he was always so well-behaved. Polite, too.”

“Yeah,” Bellamy agrees. Wells was easy to like, because he was a genuinely good guy. In a world of mostly criminals, that sort of honesty is hard to come by, so when they do, people tend to gravitate towards it.

Clarke was always the opposite; as kids, she was a sort of perpetual adult. Even while looking for faeries or pretending they were cats, Clarke ordered everyone around like a serious, military dictator. As a teenager, she chopped her hair to her chin and dyed it bright pink, like the frontrunner of some electronic funk band. She liked to make things up, and see who believed her. Aurora never really liked Clarke.

“See, this is why I shouldn’t be in here,” Aurora says. “I should be out there, with you and your sister, taking care of my babies. I warned that judge something would happen—not this, specifically, but something like it.”

“Mhm,” Bellamy agrees. He’s learned that if he just lets Aurora rant, periodically offering noises of acknowledgement, they can have whole conversations without his uttering one word.

“My lawyer says we can use this to get my sentence reduced,” she continues, pleasantly. “He says a letter from you might help; you should talk about how hard the whole thing was for you, how hard it is not having the comfort of your mother.”

“Sure,” Bellamy says, easy. There’s no way he’s writing that letter, but he knows better than to argue. Besides, if she really puts her mind to it, she can probably just get out on her own. He’s heard that in prison, they put gloves made of chainmail on all the inmates and guards, hard to slip out of or cut holes in. But Aurora can probably find a way.

“Oh, that’ll be perfect, thanks baby,” Aurora coos, and even through the phone it’s easy to imagine the adoration she’d fill him with, if she could only touch his arm, or rub his shoulders like when he was a kid. “I miss you kids so much.” She says it softly, which is how he knows it’s the truth. She may be a little erratic, but. She’s still his mom, and she loves him.

“Miss you too mom,” Bellamy says. “I have to go now; Old Man Diggs wants his phone back.” It’s a blatant lie, he can’t even see the store owner, but Aurora just huffs a laugh.

“Tell the codger to stuff it,” she says breezily. “Bye, baby. No more business with suspicious deaths, please.”

“No promises,” Bellamy says, but it comes out more serious than not.

“Behave for your grandmother,” Aurora goes on. “And listen to your cousin; he’s looking out for you.”

“Okay, mom,” Bellamy agrees. “Bye, mom.” He hangs up before she can remember some other shred of advice, or gossip.

He buys a pack of cigarettes from Old Man Diggs for his trouble—the expensive kind, though he rarely even smokes. He’ll probably find a different use for them. Cigarettes can go a long way at Phoenix, sort of like prison.

When he gets back to the house, the white cat’s grooming herself on the front porch, while the kitten dozes on one of the cinderblocks. He carefully steps over the little body, and gets a good look at the other—if he didn’t know any better, he’d swear she was Princess Killing Machine. She just stares back at him impassively, with those electric blue eyes. He opens the screen door and lets her in, leaving it cracked open for when the kitten eventually wakes.

He finds some packaged bologna in the fridge, and tears it into pieces for the cat. She snatches every other piece greedily, stacking the others in a small pile. Probably for her kitten, which makes Bellamy smile. She’s a good mom.

Indra wanders into the kitchen and eyes the cat, giving Bellamy a raised eyebrow. “She looked hungry,” he shrugs defensively. “And she doesn’t seem feral.”

“If she makes a mess,” Indra warns mildly, “You’re cleaning it.”

“Okay,” Bellamy agrees. He was going to, anyway. “She has a kitten,” he adds.

Indra grabs a block of aged cheese from the fridge, and half a pack of crackers. “They better not have fleas,” she says mildly, and wanders back out into the clutter.

Bellamy turns back to the cat, who’s glaring after Indra, looking insulted. He laughs and gives her another slice of bologna. Once she’s done, she rubs up against his shins, but when he bends to pet her, she hisses and swipes at his hand, leaving three red gashes in his skin. It stings, and a little blood drips onto the linoleum, but he just wraps a dishtowel around the wound and looks down at her, considering. She raises her paw, gone pink a little at the edges with his blood, and begins to lick it clean.

“I didn’t say you have fleas,” he says, but she doesn’t bother looking up.

Indra doesn’t seem to have any sort of method to her cleaning, so he starts with the closet under the stairs, mainly because it seems less filled than the rest of the house. He finds a box of law and economics textbooks that he knows must be Murphy’s, and some look like overdue library books, so he gives his cousin a call.

He gets an automated woman’s voice, explaining the number dialed is no longer in use, which doesn’t really surprise him. This happens, sometimes; Murphy will mysteriously lose his phone, or forget it somewhere, or break it in a car door. So he’ll spend a few days using friends’ cells, or the few scattered payphones in the city, and then he’ll text Bellamy with his new number, which he’ll only have for a few weeks.

So Bellamy calls Princeton, and gets the number for Murphy’s hall landline. Raven picks it up.

In retrospect, he probably could have just waited for Murphy to text. The books are covered in dust, so a few more days probably wouldn’t affect his late charge too drastically, but.

“Uh, is Murphy there?” he asks, trying for indifference. When he last saw Raven, she was a terrifyingly hot and pissed off college student. When she last saw him, he was an awkward fourteen year old with razor burn and skinny legs.

“Murphy dropped out four months ago,” Raven snaps, sounding just as pissed off as when he first met her. “He left a bunch of shit here, can you come get it? Or hell, I’ll bring it to you; I’m tired of looking at his stupid fucking barbells, which he never even fucking used.”

“Do you know where he is?” Bellamy asks, a little bewildered. Dropping out of Princeton seems like the sort of thing Murphy would have told him, or at least his mom.

“How the hell would I know?” Raven says. “Aren’t you his cousin?” She sounds suspicious, like she isn’t sure she should be discussing Murphy with someone that doesn’t know about such an important event. She’s probably right.

“It’s my own fault,” Bellamy says, trying to come up with something believable. Being a non-worker means he grew up learning how to con without a curse-crutch to rely on. It also means out of all the crooks in his family, he’s the best liar. “When my mom got arrested, I was kind of a mess. I refused to take his calls, or talk to anyone. Eventually he just stopped trying—I just want to find him and apologize. Maybe try and fix things.”

It’s authentic enough; he did sort of stop talking to his family, and family friends, when Aurora got arrested—but only because they stopped coming around. Turns out the non-working kid of a jailed prostitute really isn’t a popular guy in the curse-working crowd. Most good lies have some truth in them. That’s what his mom, and even Murphy, never really understood; the simple cons are the ones that people fall for.

Raven’s considering him from across the line. She’s pragmatic, he can tell, which automatically makes her a difficult mark. But she’s apparently also tired of seeing Murphy’s shit in her room, so.

“Fine,” she decides. “You remember which room?”

“Refresh my memory,” he says, trying to sound more grateful than relieved. He’d only ever visited Murphy once at his university, and only because Clarke wanted to see what it looked like.

She gives him the address, which he plugs into his phone’s GPS, and starts loading the textbooks into his emptied out duffel bag. The cat watches from her spot on his bed, while the kitten lays pressed up against her. The back of his hand has stopped bleeding, but the scratches still sting whenever he flexes his fingers, and she seems smug about it.

At the bottom of the box, tucked under one of the flaps so he almost doesn’t see it, is a sea-green rock. But when he pulls it out, he sees there’s a hole drilled through it, with a string looped through and a small tag made of cardstock at the other end. When he flips it over, all it says is remember. It looks like a charm, and based on the tag he’s betting it protects against memory work. He doesn’t understand why Murphy would have it, though; Murphy doesn’t believe in charms. He likes to say workers shouldn’t look like they distrust other workers, which is bullshit. Murphy distrusts everyone. Suspicious is his natural state of mind.

But Murphy’s also the kind of liar that will stick with a lie with an impressive amount of loyalty; he’ll keep at it so long that he starts to actually believe it. It’d make him a great con artist, except he always gets so outrageous with it, that it’s impossible to trust.

Plus, he has the face of a Disney villain. He likes to blame his law-breaking on genetics. “I never really had a choice, you know?” he’d smirk.

Bellamy pockets the charm and goes downstairs to ask Indra if he can borrow the car. She’s folding old blankets, while Band of the Banned plays on the old TV. It’s sort of like Cops, based around a squad of FBI agent workers that track down and arrest black market workers. Each episode has some sort of wrap-up at the end, where they tell the cameras how important it is to get the curse-workers off the streets, and then they make a plea for lifting the ban. “Not all works are curses,” is always the last line. “Not all magic is black.”

“Does this have anything to do with Jaha’s boy?” Indra asks mildly, still watching the show. She was usually the one at home whenever Wells and Clarke came over. Bellamy knows she was drinking buddies with Wells’ grandfather, and would watch Thelonious when he was a kid.

“Nah,” Bellamy says. It’s best not to lie to Indra; she can sniff out deceit like a bloodhound. “I found a box of Murphy’s shit, I’m taking it to him.”

“He should come get it himself,” she grunts distastefully. Murphy is everything she doesn’t like in a worker; extravagant, selfish and sleazy. Indra comes from a generation where all the workers stood together against the common threats. These days, that kind of loyalty only comes with a price, and even then it’s not exactly set in stone. Murphy would throw his mother under the bus, if it meant he got a better deal.

“Yeah,” Bellamy shrugs. “So can I have the car?”

Indra sighs, but fishes the keys out of one of the many pockets in her billowy skirts. He’s not sure how many she’s wearing, layered one on top of the other, but it looks like three. Once, he swears she was wearing seven.

“No speeding,” she warns. “And it better not have a scratch.” Indra’s car is almost as old as Bellamy, with more rust than paint, made up of dents all strung together, and badly. Even if he ran it through a guardrail, and then drove off a cliff, he doubts she’d notice much difference.

“Got it.” He waves her off, with the keys in hand, and heads outside.

He fits the phone in the space in front of the speedometer, so he can see the map as he drives, and cranks up the radio to some loud hard rock from the seventies, about a worker girl taking her gloves off under the covers. It’s incredibly risqué, for afternoon radio.

It’s almost five, which means he has a few hours before sundown, so Bellamy takes a detour to the strip mall between Walden and Princeton. It’s hollowed out some since he was a kid, now boasting only a few hair salons, random no-name boutiques that’ll be replaced by different ones within six months, an Orange Julius, and a hot pretzel cart. There are the booths in the back, of course, of soothsayers and palm readers. They all wear billowy skirts like Indra’s, and have stalls with musty purple curtains that hide the real business—charms and cheap curse jobs. Bellamy heads straight to one with a pretty, middle-aged woman.

She grins at him, with most of her teeth. “Well if it isn’t my third-favorite Blake,” she teases. “What brings you to my shabby corner of the market?”

“Hey, Luna,” Bellamy grins back. He fishes the rock from his pocket and slides it across the booth towards her. “I was hoping you could tell me what this is for.” He’s torn the tag off, just in case she decides to use that to cut corners; Luna may be like an aunt, but she’s a crooked aunt, as likely to lie and con as Murphy.

She picks up the rock to study it, and frowns. “If I had to guess,” she says slowly, “Memory. And a pretty good one.” She slides it back to him. “You looking to trade?”

Bellamy pockets the charm and shakes his head. “I’m looking for information,” he says, and waits for her eyes to narrow. Workers, especially ones as old as Luna, are naturally suspicious, of everyone and everything. It doesn’t help that Bellamy’s a non-worker. He slides a fifty dollar bill over.

Luna tucks the cash in her bra, and says “I’ll answer three questions,” because workers are also notoriously dramatic. Bellamy fights an eye-roll; he’s lucky to get this much.

“What exactly does memory work entail?”

“It depends on the worker,” Luna shrugs. “A good one can change memories, just a little so it’s not obvious right away. Or they can completely take them away. The best can replace those memories with fake ones, or different ones. Usually though they just block them, because it’s easier, and they can lie and say they took them, and get paid more. Second question?”

Bellamy hesitates, and then asks “How can you tell if your memory’s been worked?” He figures Murphy had the charm for a reason, and was worried about being worked at some point, at least. Maybe he can find out, somehow.

Luna gives him an appraising look. “You can’t,” she says. “Not for sure, anyway. You could always pay another memory worker to poke around, and unblock any walls they find, or look for blank spots. But it’s possible they’ll lie, or just take the money and then add a few fake memories so it looks like they’ve fished them out for you. Final question?”

Bellamy thinks about his own memories, prods around his mind a little. There aren’t any specific gaps that come to mind, or nothing unusual at least. He doesn’t remember much from before he was seven, but that could just be him.

And then, of course, there’s killing Clarke. But he doesn’t want to remember that, anyway.

“What kind of curse could cause someone to take their own life?” It’s probably too detailed of a question, and definitely suspicious, but. Wells had been his friend at one point, and that means something. If he was worked into his suicide, Bellamy wants to know, and he wants to know why.

Luna’s eyes narrow, and her lips thin into a straight line. “Any sort of mind worker could do that,” she admits, a little grudgingly. “Fake memories filled with guilt, or depression. An emotions curse could fill them with grief, or despair. Dreams, or nightmares, so they don’t know what’s really happening.”

Bellamy thinks back to Wells’ eyes, glazed over and bleary, like he wasn’t sure what was going on. Like he was drugged, or sleeping. He feels his blood run cold.

Who does he know that’s a dream worker? It’s not a very common curse, and the obvious answer is Octavia, but she’d have no reason to hurt Wells. She liked him. Bellamy goes through the list of workers he does know, but none immediately spring to mind. Most are luck, like Murphy and Thelonious, or physical, like Clarke and Dax. Wells himself had been a soother, able to quell thoughts and emotions with a touch. He used to go around, easing people’s minds and taking away their stress.

Bellamy thinks back to Charlotte; he’s pretty sure he’s never seen her sleep. He’s pretty sure after Dax forced her into the sand that day, he had nightmares of being eaten alive by fire ants for weeks—Murphy had been laughing about it to Bellamy one day.

He should know how it feels, don’t you think?

Bellamy feels like he’s going to throw up. She can’t be more than twelve years old. She’d practically told him what she was planning, and what had he done? Told her to keep her mouth shut, and then sent her away.

“You okay, kid?” Luna asks, wary. She probably doesn’t want him vomiting in front of her stall.

“Yeah,” Bellamy swallows thickly. “Thanks; I know you’re not supposed to tell me this sort of stuff.”

Luna gives him a wicked grin. “Everything’s for sale, Bellamy, even secrets. You should know that by now.” Bellamy nods; he does know that. He’s known it for a very long time. “Besides,” Luna winks, “You’re my third-favorite Blake.”

“Who’s the first?” Bellamy asks.

“You already got your three questions,” Luna teases, and waves him off.

Bellamy’s finishing the last of his orange Julius, just seventeen minutes from Princeton’s campus, when he sees Murphy crossing the street. He’s not a getaway driver, so it takes him a minute to swing the ancient Cadillac around and pull into the lot of some tattoo parlor. He stares at the Subway across the road, where Murphy’s just ducked inside.

He knows he should just grab the duffel and head inside, and hand it to his cousin. Maybe get a meatball sub and sit in one of the booths to catch up again. An extra-large seven up. Some sour cream and onion potato chips. He can almost taste the salt, see the oil on his gloves.

Instead, he waits. He isn’t really sure why, other than the fact that he’s pretty sure Charlotte’s the one that killed Wells, and Murphy’s the one that sent her to Phoenix in the middle of the night.

He doesn’t end up waiting very long; soon enough, Murphy’s ducking out the side door, into an alley. Bellamy has a clear view of it from his seat, and watches as two men follow his cousin out. They’re around his age, and he vaguely recognizes their faces, but mostly he recognizes their collars; the barbed scars around their necks like chains, packed thick with ash till the skin there is mottled and gray. The sign they’re forced to wear, that reveals them as Jaha’s employees. Murphy has an identical one, that he keeps covered up by all his pinstriped dress shirts. All he has to do these days to make someone cooperate is pop a few buttons, and show it off.

The two men are Myles and Mbege; Bellamy remembers seeing them hang around like sticky shadows, or a bad smell, when Clarke and Wells came to visit in Walden. They look mostly the same as they did back when they were just gangly teenagers. Same pinched faces, same scowls, same black leather jackets. They talk with Murphy for some time, and then give a few head bobs before slithering out down the street. Bellamy almost pulls out to follow after them, but then another figure steps out towards Murphy.

He’s around Bellamy’s age, just a teenager himself, with a dark hood pulled over his dark head. He doesn’t stick around to say much, just takes the wad of cash Murphy folds into his hand before taking off after the first two.

Bellamy’s just about to cross over to his cousin—maybe lean against the wall casually beside him and ask what shady deals he’s just made—when the passenger door opens, and Raven Reyes slides into the seat.

She scowls at him, and nods her head towards Murphy, lingering in the alley to light a cigarette. “So what the fuck was all that, right?” Bellamy stares at her a little dumbly and she rolls her eyes. “Well are we gonna follow those dealers, or what?”

“Dealers?” Bellamy asks, still a little thrown by her everything.

“Look, I grew up in the ghettos,” Raven huffs, “Those dudes were definitely dealers. So are we going after them?”

“Uh,” Bellamy says, “Yeah.” He turns the key and pulls after the men—he’s pretty sure they’re not dealers, at least not the drug kind, but it can’t hurt to make sure. Plus he doesn’t really want to find out what happens when he says no to Raven Reyes.

She’s finishing off his orange Julius, which is a little annoying. She slurps the dregs obnoxiously as they comb the streets. “How’d you even find me?” Bellamy wonders, and Raven shrugs, like it should be obvious.

“I recognized the car,” she says, “From the last time I was at your house.” She actually looks a little embarrassed about that, like she’d tried hard to forget about their one night stand, and she’s a little upset that she hasn’t. “There!” she points down a skinny alley that the car definitely won’t fit through, where the hooded boy is pulling his hand back from Myles’s neck, as the man crumples down to the ground. Mbege is laying still on the ground some feet away. Bellamy pulls the Cadillac into a terrible attempt at a parallel park, and hops out with Raven just behind him.

The hooded boy turns towards them at the sound of their car doors slamming shut, and he takes off down the alley. Bellamy chases after him, not bothering to think about it. He can’t see or hear Raven, but he’s pretty sure she’s running too. He catches up to the boy at the end of the alley, a dead end, as he turns to face them.

Bellamy slows to a stop, breathing heavy because he’s not that used to sprinting after potential serial killers. A quick glance behind him proves Raven isn’t there, but he doesn’t really have time to worry about that. The boy’s shoulders are hunching over, and he looks like a tomcat getting ready to scrap. Bellamy’s pretty sure he can take him in a fist fight, but the limp bodies of Mbege and Myles say otherwise.

“Did you kill them?” he demands, and the boy scowls.

“So what if I did?” he says back. “Who cares? They deserved it.”

“Right,” Bellamy snaps, “You did it for the better good, not the wad of cash in your pocket.”

The boy seems surprised, and then wary, which is understandable. He’s trying to figure out how much Bellamy saw, how much he knows already. “Who are you?”

“No one,” Bellamy says, and then thinks better of it. Clearly the boy sort of knows Murphy, so maybe he can use that. “I’m Murphy’s cousin.”

The boy perks up instantly. “The Blake kid?” he asks, “From Walden?”

“Yeah,” Bellamy says, hoping he’s not going to regret telling the truth. He doesn’t do it very often, and it’s a little uncomfortable. He’s not sure how to work the angle. “Bellamy.”

The boy actually smirks, which doesn’t seem good. “Clarke’s friend,” he says, and Bellamy actually forgets how to breathe for a moment.

“You knew Clarke?” It’s strange to think she knew someone he didn’t, although of course he knew she did. She must have; she had a whole other life that didn’t include him. He was just her part-time friend over the summers, awkward and completely not special.

The boy nods. “I lived with her and her mom for a while,” he says, “When Jaha first took me in. She told me about you,” he grins, and two of his teeth are black. He pulls them out without much effort, and tosses them away unceremoniously. “I’m Miller.”

“You’re a death worker,” Bellamy realizes, staring at the blackened teeth on the ground between them. If that’s his only blowback, he’s the strongest death worker Bellamy’s ever seen. Stronger even than Indra, which. Well, he didn’t really know that was possible.

Miller shrugs, and his hood slides down a little. His hair is braided in two tight rows down his scalp, like thick black horns. He grins, crooked with his missing teeth. Bellamy can see the dark pink of his tongue through the gap. It’s unsettling. “You gonna turn me in?”

Bellamy glances back towards Mbege and Myles, still unmoving. They probably shouldn’t leave two corpses so close to the sidewalk, but Miller probably knows more about body disposal than him. He turns back, shaking his head, right as Raven hops silently down from the wall behind Miller. She’s holding a wooden board like a baseball bat, wound all the way back and ready to swing. Bellamy raises a hand, “Rav—”

The board cracks against Miller’s head before Bellamy can finish, and the death worker falls to the ground like one of his corpses. Bellamy stares down at him for a moment—his chest is still moving, thank God—and then he looks at Raven, exasperated.

She shrugs, board slung over her shoulder nonchalantly. “I grew up in the ghettos,” she says, and then points the board towards the Cadillac. “Help me get him in the trunk of your grandma’s car.”

By the time Miller wakes up, they’re in the abandoned parking lot of what used to be a drive-in theater. Bellamy remembers coming here once as a kid; Jake, Clarke’s dad, took them when he was still alive.

Miller wakes up more gracefully than Bellamy thought was humanly possible; no huge yawns or drooling or cracking the back. He sits up slowly, blinks a few times and looks around. He takes in Raven and Bellamy the way he takes in everything else—the crumbling granite with weeds and grass poking through the cracks, the rusting construction machines and what’s left of the huge movie screen. And the fact that he’s in the trunk of a car.

“You here to kill me?” he asks, pretty mildly all things considered. Raven looks like she’s actually considering it, but Bellamy’s quick to set the record straight.

“We just want some answers,” he says.

“He wants answers,” Raven argues. “I want to hit someone with a stick, again.”

Bellamy ignores her. “You said you knew Clarke Griffin,” he starts, and Miller nods a little.

“I crashed at her pad for a while. She was really cool.” He smirks a little. “She told me about that time your cousin threatened to make her forget when he and Dax cut her hair off, but then you pretended to be your grandma, coming up the stairs, and scared em off.”

“Wait, what?” Bellamy combs through all his childhood memories, but can’t come up with that one. “That never happened.”

Miller frowns. “You sure? She seemed really impressed with you.”

Raven rolls her eyes. “So she made the whole thing up, so what? Kids makes hit up all the time.”

It’s true, and Clarke was always the biggest liar of them all. But her stories always served a purpose; she was pretending to be some long-lost fey princess, or she was conning someone. What reason could she have to make up some story about Bellamy coming to her rescue? And what did that even mean—Murphy threatened to make her forget. Make her forget, how? He’s a luck worker.

Maybe one of his thug friends growing up was a memory worker. It would certainly make sense, and he wouldn’t have told Bellamy about it.

“Do you know any memory workers?” he asks Miller, sounding desperate even to himself. That isn’t smart, but he’s having trouble strategizing at the moment. He doesn’t have the energy for a con.

Miller considers the question for a moment. “A couple hire-ups maybe,” he shrugs. “No names though. No addresses or anything. Clarke said there was a girl she knew about, went to some fancy rich kid school. Her dad was big into worker rights.”

Bellamy thinks about Maya, with her hands and wrists covered in memos. Telling her how old she is, her own name. Memory workers’ blowback works as a sort of Alzheimer’s. Each job they work eats away at their own memory. He wonders how many times Maya has woken up not knowing who she is.

Bellamy stares down at Miller, sitting cross-legged and casual in the trunk of the Cadillac. “If I let you go right now, what are the odds of you coming after us?”

“Are you serious?” Raven hisses, digging her fingers into Bellamy’s arm, but he shrugs her off.

“Negative,” Miller says. “I have no interest in holding a grudge; I do my job, that’s all. I’m not about to bite the hand that feeds me.”

Bellamy nods and steps back, clearing his way. He drags Raven back with him, taking the board, just in case. Miller gives them a curt nod, flicks his hood back up, and strides across the lot, disappearing among the rubble.

“He’s going to come after us,” Raven declares, vicious.

“He won’t,” Bellamy shakes his head. “He has nothing to gain from that, and he knows I was important to Clarke. Which means people will notice if something happens to me.”

“Didn’t stop whoever went after the Jaha kid,” Raven points out.

Bellamy scoffs. “I’m not that important.” He calls Jasper, who picks up on the fourth ring. Jasper always answers his phone with something ridiculous and potentially incriminating.

“You’ve reached local vampire hunter Jordan, how would you like your stakes?” Yeah, like that. Bellamy rolls his eyes.

“High-risk and not made of wood,” he deadpans. “Hold the garlic.”

“Blake!” Jasper crows happily. “Man, I had no idea you got this much business in one day—we’re up six hundred already!”

“Good job,” Bellamy says mildly. “I need you to get Maya Vie, and meet me somewhere.”

“What?” Jasper asks. Bellamy hasn’t ever really bothered hiding his dislike for Maya, so the kid has good reason to be surprised.

“There’s an all-night café on West 24^th in Princeton, can you be there in an hour?”

“What?” Jasper repeats, and Bellamy fights the urge to swear. “Sorry, uh,” he can hear Jasper rustling around, probably pulling his shoes on. There’s the clink of metal on metal, like car keys. “We’ll be there,” he promises. “Everything okay, dude?”

“Yeah,” Bellamy bites out. “See you there.” He hangs up, and turns to find Raven watching him, completely unimpressed.

“I take it this Maya girl’s the memory worker?” she asks, already knowing the answer. Bellamy nods, and she slides into the passenger seat, him staring after her.

“What are you doing?” he demands.

“Coming with you, obviously,” she scoffs. “You owe me so many lattes. Get in.”

The café doesn’t have lattes; it has greasy onion rings, cold French fries, and greasier hamburgers. It also has unlimited refills on stale black coffee. The waitress is an older, overweight woman with ketchup-red hair who eyes them skeptically, clearly hoping they aren’t the type to ask for unlimited refills on their coffee.

Bellamy knows they are exactly that type of people. Raven also gets onion rings.

“You know she called me up?” Raven blurts, dipping a ring in some mayonnaise-ketchup mix she’s pooled onto a napkin. It’s pink, goopy and disgusting. Clarke ate her fries the same way; she claimed that was how they ate them in Europe. “The day after I showed up at your house, and found them there—her and Finn—she called me, and took me out to lunch. To apologize, even though she was just a kid. She didn’t even do anything wrong, I mean, the bastard was nineteen. Jesus. Right?” She chews absent mindedly on the ruined onion ring. “Anyway, she took me out, and I’m thinking, you know, this poor kid just didn’t know any better. But then she sort of smirked, and said ‘Don’t worry; he got what he deserved.’” She swallows the rest of the ring, and chases it down with lukewarm coffee.

She fixes Bellamy with a hard look. “Two days later, and I find out Finn had to go on medical leave, because somehow he was disemboweled, but survived. Do you know that’s medically impossible? At least, usually.”

Bellamy doesn’t respond. He doesn’t need Raven to tell him what happened; he can picture it pretty easily. Clarke probably found a mouse, or a small bird. Something easily caught, easily damaged. Then she split it open with a knife, or one of her sharp nail files. Then she took off a glove and healed it, and soaked up their wounds to store like a sponge. And the next person she touched was Finn. She must have healed him too, but only halfway, at the end. Just so he had to live with the pain.

That was always what happened; people would see Clarke; tiny, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Clarke, with a fairytale curse—the ability to heal people, save people. They’d call her cute, or kind, and then they’d turn away because someone like Clarke wasn’t worth keeping an eye on. She was always underestimated, which was always how she won.

“And then I realized, shit, I’m the one who didn’t know better.” Raven mops up the rest of her sauce with the last ring. “Fucking terrifying,” she declares around a mouthful. “But pretty cool. Finn was an asshole.”

“So, what,” Bellamy drawls, finishing his third cup of coffee. All that’s left is the dregs, but he swallows them anyway. “You want to help avenge her?”

“Nah,” Raven smirks. “But this beats cramming for econ-2.”

Jasper and Maya arrive looking nervous, out of place and completely obvious. Bellamy waves them over, and they slide into the booth—Jasper beside Bellamy, Maya beside Raven. Somehow they’ve segregated themselves by gender, like some sort of double date from the fifties. Bellamy nearly laughs at the thought.

Instead he turns to Maya, straight-faced and serious, and says “You’re a memory worker.”

Maya looks the most ruffled he’s ever seen her, eyes wide and skin paler than usual. But she doesn’t deny it. She looks ready to run, though. Raven apparently agrees, and loops an arm through Maya’s—a brave move, considering Maya could potentially wipe her entire memory with the touch of a finger.

“I need you to work me,” Bellamy says, figuring it’s probably best to just get to the point. The sun is setting, and Indra will call him soon, wondering where he is. Then she’ll call Murphy, and Bellamy’s pretty sure he doesn’t want Murphy involved.

Maya blanches—meanwhile, Jasper’s still looking completely bewildered, like he can’t understand how he’s a part of this conversation. “I can’t,” Maya stutters. “I don’t work—ever. I don’t even know if I could have the control necessary to, do whatever it is you need.”

Bellamy waves her concerns away, feeling more impatient with every second. He needs to know what other memories might have been stolen, or changed. His whole mind feels slippery, liable to get away at any moment. He thinks about Clarke, about her blood on him and the knife in his hands. He wonders if that’s a doctored scene, too. If someone took out the grisly details.

If someone planted the whole thing. He can hope, however wishful.

He wonders if he should chance letting Maya poke around in his head, peek at all his secrets, his family’s secrets. Clarke’s death. But in the end, he needs to know, and if worse comes to worst, he can just threaten her. She may have a lot of connections in the legal and political spheres, but he’s family friends with a serial killer. His grandmother was a professional hitman. He’s pretty sure he wins.

“I need you to work me,” he says, leaving no room for argument. Jasper fidgets beside him, clearly uncomfortable with the way this night has turned out. Their waitress comes over with two new mugs of slightly steaming coffee, for Jasper and Maya. She gives them each a glare for good measure before heading back to the kitchen.

“Why?” Maya demands. “If I’m going to, I need to know why, and what I’m getting into.”

“I’m missing memories,” Bellamy admits. “Things that happened when I was a kid, I can’t remember. I need you to tell me if there are more, or if any of my memories have been changed.”

“Dude,” Jasper breathes.

“I’ll pay you,” Bellamy tries. He can’t really afford much on his own, but maybe he can dip into the betting pool a little, or ask Murphy for a loan.

“I don’t want your money,” Maya says, eyes hardened to a glare. “Fine, I’ll do it. But I can’t promise you’ll like whatever I find.”

Bellamy grins meanly. “I can promise I won’t like anything you find.” There are two alternatives; the first, that he was worked, and not all of his memories can be trusted. And the second, that he wasn’t worked, and he’s just going insane. Neither prospect is very appealing.

Maya awkwardly reaches across the table for his hand, but Jasper snatches it away and hisses “Really? You think it’s a good idea to do that right here?”

They glance around the café; it’s not very busy, but there are a few people milling about in the booths or at the counter, watching some Tennis match. Jasper’s right; working is illegal, and even if nobody’s really paying attention to four kids drinking coffee, two bared hands are going to be noticed.

Bellamy tosses a few bills onto the table, and they slide out of the booth. They manage to somehow cram into the handicapped one-stall bathroom, making sure to lock the door. It feels strange, taking his glove off in public. Maya follows suit, still uncertain, and then grips his wrist softly.

“I’ll try to conserve your privacy,” she promises. “It’s easier if you just relax.”

Bellamy closes his eyes, and tries to loosen his shoulders. Mostly, he’s focusing on keeping his breathing even. The feel of anyone touching his skin with naked fingers is a little unnerving. He hasn’t felt this since his mom went to jail. Even Murphy doesn’t try.

He doesn’t feel like he’s being worked. He doesn’t feel anything. He’d sort of expected there to be some sensation, like when he got his ears flushed at the doctor’s, or the sharp prick of a flu shot. Instead, there’s just Maya’s cold fingers, pressed right above his pulse point. There’s Jasper’s nervous breathing, and Raven’s harsh presence just behind him. There’s the grimy tile of the bathroom, and the smell of toilet paper molding in the water.

Finally, Maya’s hand is suddenly gone, and he opens his eyes. The world doesn’t look any different. He still feels the same.

Maya frowns deeply. “Bellamy, whoever worked you didn’t just block your memories. They took them, and replaced them with different ones. I could tell the difference between natural ones, and fixed ones, but I couldn’t revert them. There have to be at least three dozen gaps, where they just plucked out the scene.”

Bellamy nods; after all, he’d expected this. “How long ago did it stop?”

Maya’s frown deepens. “The most recent was just one week ago.”

That, he did not expect, and it hits him like a car. Or a train. Something large and dense and incredibly destructive. Something that breaks bone. “There was a memory, with a girl—a blonde girl, and a, uh,” he glances worriedly at Jasper and Raven. “A knife,” he urges. “What about that one?”

Maya shifts uncomfortably. “Fake,” she says. “But not a new memory, just a changed one. I can’t tell you what they did to it, though. I can’t say which parts are real.”

She’d seen the whole thing then, but Bellamy can’t bring himself to worry. It’s fake, it was tampered with. It’s possible the real parts are the worst ones, the grin on his face and the knife in his hands, her burial behind the barn, but maybe not.

Maybe this reality is not his own.

“Thank you,” he says, and means it. He’s realized he can’t threaten Maya, and anyway he doesn’t have to. She won’t tell anyone, because it’ll mean exposing herself as a worker. His secrets are safe, at least for now.

Jasper drives away with Maya in his hearse. He doesn’t speak to Bellamy, or meet his eye, for the rest of the night. Raven heads back to campus shortly after. “It’s been real,” she says in place of goodbye. “I hope you sort your shit out. I’ll Fedex Murphy’s things.”

He drives back to Indra’s, one eye on Google maps, and the other on the memory charm resting in the ash tray. He’s going to start wearing it, he knows, but what happens when he’s worked? The stone will crack after the first time, and then it’s useless. Stone is the only substance that can absorb a curse, but it works once and then never again. He’ll need to get more.

And where will he wear it? Indra can’t know. Murphy definitely can’t know. He can’t just stash it in his pocket or shoe and hope for the best. Three dozen times, he’s been worked. He’s pretty sure he’s earned the right to be paranoid.

He pulls over just ten minutes outside of Walden, and digs through the middle console, and then the glovebox, searching for something sharp enough. He ends up with a box cutter that looks clean enough, and an old silk, elbow-length glove that must have been his mother’s. He digs out Indra’s secret stash of bourbon from under the passenger seat, and spills a little over the box cutter’s blade. Then he splashes his hand, rolls up his pant leg, and spreads the alcohol over a patch of skin on his calf. Then he cuts it open, and slides the charm inside.

It’s the most painful experience of his life, and he has to clench his jaw so tight he’s worried about breaking teeth, but he does it. Then he ties the glove around the gash as a makeshift bandage, until he finds a proper one at the house.

When he walks into the house, he hears Octavia’s voice pretty instantly. She’s in the living room, sort of helping Indra sort through old candlesticks, but mostly watching Band of the Banned, and dangling a shoestring in front of the kitten by her feet. The white cat rests half on O’s lap, looking pleased as anything. Bellamy can’t help feeling a little jealous. He’d begun thinking of her as his cat, which is absurd. He doesn’t even like cats.

He bends down to scratch her ears anyway, and then flops next to O on the couch. “What are you doing here?” he asks mildly.

“What, not happy to see me?” Octavia raises a brow. “Rude.” She strokes the cat’s long spine. “Also, how could you not tell me you got a pet cat—two pet cats, Bell.

“You seem to have found out anyway,” Bellamy grumbles, eyeing the cat a little petulantly. Her eyes are closed, and she’s purring on his sister’s lap. Traitor.

This is why he’s a dog person. Dogs are loyal.

“How are you getting to school tomorrow?” Octavia grins at him cheekily, and he groans. “How’d you get here tonight?”

“My friend drove me,” she says with practiced nonchalance, turning back to the TV. “Lincoln.”

“Long way to drive,” Bellamy muses.

“He’s a good friend,” O shoots back.

If she’s waiting for his reaction, she doesn’t show it, and so Bellamy only shrugs. He’ll have time to worry about his sister’s behemoth of a boyfriend later. Right now, he’s got a lot on his mind.

He goes to bed early—well, earlier than he’s used to. When he sleeps, he does not dream.

When he wakes, the white cat is pillowed beside his arm, licking at the scratches on the back of his hand. Except there are no scratches—the skin there is red from her tongue, but otherwise unblemished. He snatches it away to study it in the gray dawn-light leaking through his window, while the cat watches with a heavy stare.

All at once, he’s reminded of a time when he was thirteen, with Clarke newly returned from a whirlwind year in Europe. She was at his house, and they were in the kitchen eating popsicles. He’d cut his finger open on the serrated plastic covering, and blood had welled up to the cut. He’d been about to run it under the tap, but Clarke grabbed his wrist with bare fingers, and stuck his finger in her mouth. She pulled it out with a wet pop, and stuck out her tongue so he could see the red of his own blood, while the skin of his finger was newly healed. Her own finger split open a few seconds later, but she just wiped it on the thigh of her shorts and tucked her hand back in her glove with a grin.

Bellamy stares at the cat, and the cat stares back, and he blames it on the last dregs of exhaustion, but he’s pretty sure those eyes aren’t just similar to Clarke’s. They are Clarke’s. He knows those eyes; he stared at them for six summers. He watched them cloud over and fade.

“Clarke?” he whispers, and the cat meows. Then she stands and pads over to him, reaching down to press her nose to his. As he watches, she raises a paw, and he sees three red scratches cut into the flesh there. He watches them fade, and he knows.

“You’re a cat,” he says stupidly, and Clarke seems to agree because she bites his chin. “Okay,” he nods, “How are you a cat? And how do I fix you?”

It’s entirely possible he’s talking to a stray cat, convinced it’s actually the childhood best friend he supposedly murdered, but. He’s pretty sure he’s not wrong, this time.

She presses her furry head against his hand, until he rolls it over for her, palm-up. Then she licks at the heel of his palm, and his fingers, and his fingernails. “I don’t understand,” he says, frustrated because he found her, he has her, she’s not dead, she’s alive she’s alive she’s alive—and it doesn’t fucking matter. She’s still a cat, and he’s still completely not equipped to handle this situation.

Octavia chooses that moment to bang at his door, and then kick it for good measure. “We’re late! You’re ruining my future,” she calls cheerily through the wood. “Beauty sleep’s over—let’s go!”

Clarke glares at him, saying don’t you dare, and he holds his hands up in surrender as he stands. “I’ll come back for you,” he promises. “We’ll figure this out, I swear. I’m not fucking leaving you.” Not again, he wants to say. He wants to tell her how horrible it’s been, existing without her. Convinced he was the reason she was gone. He wants to tell her what he wasn’t brave enough to say when they were kids.

Instead, he says, “I’ll be right back,” and dresses in a clean shirt and his flannel pajama pants, tugs on a pair of sneakers, and heads out to drive his sister to school. Octavia changes the radio station to some electronic pop station, where the songs are all in Korean. She bops along to the beat for a few minutes, before speaking.

“Wells was my friend too,” she says blatantly. “You don’t have to do this alone, you know.”

Bellamy eyes her. “I know,” he agrees, and Octavia frowns.

“Then don’t act like it,” she chides. “The whole sibling thing goes both ways. Okay?”

Bellamy smiles, mostly to himself. It’s easy to forget sometimes, how observant his sister is. “Okay.”

When he pulls up to Phoenix, she makes a point to unbutton the first buttons of her blouse, and hike her skirt up a little. She’s glancing at him from the corner of her eye, as if daring him to argue. He doesn’t. “Have a good day at school,” he calls as she steps out.

Octavia rolls her eyes. “Thanks, dad,” she teases. “Love you, loser.”

“Love you, brat,” he chirps, and pulls away.

Phoenix Academy is about an hour and a half’s drive from Indra’s house, so by the time Bellamy gets back, the sun is bright and the world’s awake. Murphy’s Benz is sinking in the drive.

“Hey, cuz,” Murphy calls amiably from where he’s leaning against the kitchen counter, sipping at a mug of coffee. Indra’s glaring disdainfully from the hall.

“Hey,” Bellamy nods, itching to run upstairs to Clarke, but knowing he can’t. “What’s up?”

Murphy shrugs. “Indra said you came to see me yesterday?”

Bellamy nods, mind whirling to spin up a believable lie. “I tried calling, but couldn’t reach you. So I called your roommate, and we met for coffee.” Simple, and sort of the truth. Close enough, anyway. And Murphy’s giving him that wicked grin, which means he must remember Raven, and Bellamy’s past with her.

“How is she?” he fishes. “Bit of a control freak, but damn was she hot.”

From the hall, Indra slams a box on the floor. It’s unclear whether or not this is on purpose, because of Murphy’s comment, or his presence itself. Either way, he seems pleased about it.

“I have a bunch of your school shit in the car,” Bellamy says, thumbing back towards the Cadillac.

“Keep it,” Murphy shrugs. “I called Animal Control,” he adds. “Got rid of those stray cats for you.”

Bellamy’s entire body goes rigid, while he pretends he’s not having a panic attack. Murphy doesn’t seem to notice. “What do you mean?”

“What do I mean?” Murphy echoes, looking at Bellamy blankly. “What part of that do you need a fucking elaboration on?”

“Which cats?” Bellamy presses, and Murphy scoffs.

“Indra said you’d gone soft for the white one—I didn’t believe her. I thought you hated cats.”

“Not that one,” Bellamy says hotly, pushing past Murphy to head up the stairs. He’s not sure what he expects to find; he knows Murphy isn’t lying about this. Clarke isn’t nestled in the pillows of his bed, or hiding underneath with all the old stuffed animals and totes of winder hats. He wants to call her name, to look for her, but he’s pretty sure that would give too much away.

Or they’ll just think he’s even crazier than they already do.

He skips down the stairs, to find Murphy pulling out in his Benz. Indra just watches as Bellamy snatches up the keys to the Cadillac. He waits five minutes before going after him. The trick to tailing someone is letting them think they’ve given you the slip.

Murphy drives like a suburban housewife, never going more than three miles over the speed limit, and never trying to run yellow lights. When you’re a professional criminal, you learn which laws aren’t worth breaking. Most workers are tidy drivers, and they always file their taxes on time. They’ve learned a lot from Al Capone.

Murphy ends up parked just outside a duplex only three blocks over from the café. Bellamy pulls up several houses behind him, and waits. Once he sees his cousin unlock the front door with his own key, he programs the address in his phone, and then leaves.

Walden doesn’t have its own Animal Control unit, so that means Murphy must have called the county. Which means they took the cats to the county shelter, which is where Bellamy goes next. It looks more like a long warehouse, than an animal pound. It looks remarkably like a prison.

Bellamy slides through the door, caught between trying to look like he belongs there, and trying to go unnoticed. It seems to work, probably because the only cashier is helping a little girl and her mother fill out the paperwork to adopt a corgi. Bellamy goes into the back, where they keep the animals. He’s pretty sure he’s allowed there, but he’s careful about it anyway, searching each cage for a white cat with familiar blue eyes.

He finds her near the end, wrapped around the kitten and terrified. Her eyes go wide when he peers down at her, feeding his gloved fingers through the bars. She crawls over, the cage too small for her to stand, and rubs up against the leather of his gloves. “I told you I’d come back to you,” he whispers, and she cries.

He’s going to kill Murphy. But first he has to jailbreak his best friend, a cat.

Bellamy goes up to the cashier with his best good-kid smile. “I’d like to buy the white cat, in the back,” he says cheerfully. The cashier, a twenty-something woman looking frazzled, digs around in a few drawers behind the counter, before setting a packet of forms in front of him, and a slim black pen chained to the countertop like at the bank.

“I need to see some photo ID,” she says, and he’s quick to fish out his license as he writes out his name. There’s no point in lying about any of the information, but he does anyway. He doesn’t like the thought of his grandmother’s home address on any legal documents, even ones at an animal shelter.

The woman frowns down at his license. “It says here you’re seventeen,” she points out, and his pen stills.

“Uh, yeah,” he says, uncertain. But then she points to the sign hanging behind her, reading MUST BE 18 OR OLDER TO ADOPT. “Look,” he tries, feeling the desperation set in. “You don’t understand—that’s my cat, there was a mistake and they took her.”

“Do you have a note with your parents’ permission?” she tries, clearly feeling sorry for him. “If not, I can’t really help you.”

“Okay,” he nods, because what else can he do? “Okay.” He can call Indra, she has a landline, but it’s been out of use for so long he’s not sure it’s even still connected. It’d be easier just to call someone he knows that’s eighteen, and pay them to buy Clarke back for him.

Jasper is sixteen, a year behind Bellamy. Maya’s his age. Monty, he’s pretty sure, is in the same grade as Jasper, but he doesn’t really know. It’s worth a try.

“Jordan Morgue; you stab them, we slab them, which stiff’s for you?”

“How old is Monty?” Bellamy says, in place of hello. There’s a pause while Jasper considers.

“Sixteen,” he says, “Which is, like, the age of consent, so—”

“Who do you know that’s eighteen, and would be willing to do me a favor?”

“Dude, I don’t know anyone that kills people,” Jasper says, and Bellamy tries not to feel offended. “Or any prostitutes,” he adds.

“My cousin called animal control on my cat, and I need to be eighteen to buy her back from the pound,” Bellamy explains. It’s technically all true.

“Your cousin’s a douche,” Jasper says mildly. He’s met Murphy only once. It did not go well.

 “Yeah,” Bellamy agrees. “So you know anyone?”

“I might,” Jasper muses. “He’s a fan of felines, so. He’ll probably do it just for the cat.”

“Great.” Bellamy rattles off the shelter’s address, and then sits in one of the orange plastic bucket seats to wait. There are a few Lilo and Stitch coloring books, and one of those toys with the bent wires and wooden beads, but mostly he just plays Robot Unicorn Attack on his phone and worries.

Finally the bell above the door chimes, and he turns to see Jasper, Lincoln, Monty and Maya walking in. He feels a wave of irritation at the extra faces, but swallows it down quickly. They’re here to help, and none of them never even had to come in the first place. They’re doing him a favor.

They’re helping him save Clarke.

Lincoln doesn’t bother trying to seem pleasant or even well-meaning; he just fills out the forms and hands over Bellamy’s cash with his usual serious frown. The cashier eyes their group skeptically, lingering on Bellamy as if to let him know she realizes what they’re up to, and she disapproves. He just grins back at her and heads back to snatch Clarke from her cage.

She leaps up as soon as he’s in view, meowing up a storm as the teen employee unlocks her cage a little warily. She bares her teeth at the kid, and then falls into Bellamy’s arms with a purr. The boy—he can’t be more than sixteen, and clearly doesn’t want to be there—offers a cardboard carrier, but Bellamy shakes his head. He can’t put her behind bars again, even cardboard ones.

He goes to leave, but then she starts writhing around, slipping out of his grip and hissing. The kid’s eyes go wide, and he’s clearly debating running for help, and hiding in the corner.

“What?” Bellamy asks, bewildered, dropping her to the floor. She glares up at him and then runs back to the cage, nosing through the bars towards the kitten, who mewls pitifully and licks her whiskers.

“Okay,” Bellamy sighs, taking a moment to hope the kitten isn’t actually hers. He isn’t really an aficionado on cat sex, but he’s fairly sure it’s unpleasant, and anyway she’s not even a real cat. It must have been horrifying.

He has Lincoln buy the kitten, and the cashier looks like she wants to refuse them, but ultimately takes the fifty dollars and files the forms, with maybe a little more vehemence than strictly necessary. Bellamy gives Lincoln the kitten to hold, as compensation, and even he has to admit the usually stern-faced man definitely goes soft for it.

“Thanks,” Bellamy says once they’re out in the parking lot. Clarke has nested in his arms, letting him hold her weight. She’s purring, but she pops her head up every few seconds to peek over his arm and check on the kitten, perching happily on Lincoln’s shoulder like a parrot.

Monty leans down until he’s eye-level with Clarke, who stares back at him disinterestedly. “Princess Killing Machine?” he asks slowly, glancing up at Bellamy in question. “She got out again, after you left. I thought she just ran away.”

Bellamy curls his arms a little tighter around Clarke, until she growls and bites at the leather of his glove. “Guess she liked me,” he shrugs. Monty eyes him, clearly skeptical. Bellamy’s not really sure how much he should tell them—Guys, my best friend was turned into a cat three years ago, but I spent all this time thinking I’d killed her and buried her in my backyard, doesn’t really seem like a great conversation starter.

In the end, it’s Maya who puts a hand on Bellamy’s arm, fingers brushing against Clarke’s fur. The cat growls a little, but doesn’t seem terribly upset. “We understand, Bellamy,” Maya says with a small smile. “If you can’t explain, just yet.”

It’s surprisingly comforting. Bellamy shakes her hand off, gently. He’s still a little wary about letting so many people glimpse his life outside of Phoenix, but he’s pretty sure he lucked out with these ones. He still doesn’t really trust them—he pretty much only trusts Clarke, O, and Indra—but he thinks he could, maybe. Eventually.

He turns to Lincoln as they all drift off towards their cars—Bellamy to the Cadillac, Jasper and the others to the hearse. Lincoln holds out the kitten for Bellamy to take, looking rather disappointed about it.

“Did you drive my little sister to Walden yesterday?” Bellamy asks as the kitten tries not to fall off his shoulders. Lincoln, at least, looks a little bashful about it.

“She needed a ride,” he explains. Bellamy eyes him for a moment.

“Thanks,” he says, and he can tell Lincoln’s surprised by his reaction, which makes him a little smug. “Next time, call a cab.”

Clarke spends the ride back to Indra’s, grooming the kitten in the passenger seat. The kitten, meanwhile, spends the trip trying to escape Clarke so it can look out the window, and bat at a moth caught in one of the air vents. Even as a cat, Bellamy can see Clarke’s annoyance, which is…nice. It’s familiar.

It’d be nicer if she wasn’t a cat, though.

Indra has left a note on the counter, written in what looks like actual blood but could maybe be wine or something. She’s apparently at a friend’s, though she doesn’t say who, which doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but. Most of Indra’s friends are retired assassins, so there’s that. And Bellamy can’t remember the last time Indra left her home more than once in a single week. She’s sort of a hermit, but that really only makes her more intimidating.

He carries Clarke back up to his room, just in case. He doesn’t really want his grandmother walking in to find him interrogating a cat. She still thinks he killed Clarke.

Watch Clarke knead her way through his bedsheets before nestling down is a little surreal. His best friend’s a cat, and she thinks he can fix her. He’s not really sure why she thinks that, but he’s not about to let her down.

“O-kay,” he drawls, trying to decide what to ask first. He starts with the obvious. “What happened?”

Clarke blinks at him, somehow sarcastically. Right, she can’t really answer. He rolls his eyes.

“Paraphrase,” he says. “Here,” he drags over a cardboard box, filled with miscellaneous comics, broken crayons, and Happy Meal toys from when he was a kid. He rifles through it, coming up with an alphabet stencil kit, the kind used to help kids learn how to write letters. He spreads out the letters like tiles across the floor, while Clarke looks on, skeptical.

“Come on,” he urges, scooping her up. She gives an undignified yowl, and digs her claws into his gloves. He drops her just in front of the letters, and ignores her glare. “Now you can cuss me out,” he offers cheerfully.

Clarke bats at the F tile, and then hits the U with her tail. She blinks up at him smugly when he laughs. “I missed you,” he says, stroking the fur between her ears. She leans into his hand, and cuffs at the number 2 before licking his gloved thumb.

“Clarke, what happened?” Bellamy watches as she turns towards the letters, deciding on her answer before pulling out the M tile, then U, R, P, H, and Y. Bellamy stares at the blocky name of his cousin a little dumbly. “Murphy turned you into a cat?” Clarke shakes her head firmly, and then pounces on the D, the A, and X.

Murphy and Dax somehow got Clarke turned into a cat. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why; everyone always knew Wells wasn’t going to follow his father’s footsteps. Wells was too kind, too forgiving to run the business. Dax would have been the obvious replacement, but Thelonious always had a soft spot for his goddaughter.

Dax would have wanted her out of the way, and he has the connections to do it. To be honest, Bellamy’s surprised he didn’t have her killed.

Murphy would have gone along with it because he had nothing better to do. Or maybe out of loyalty to Dax, but even that seems a stretch.

“How?” Bellamy asks. Clarke noses at the T square, then R-A-N-S-W-O-R-K-E-R. Trans worker. Trans is short for Transformation, which is probably the most surreal piece of this entire absurd puzzle.

Transformation workers are the rarest of them all; everyone says there’s only one born every generation, though Bellamy’s pretty sure that’s scientifically impossible. Still, they’re not at all common. He knows there was one wandering around China back when he was a kid, but no one’s heard about him in a decade. There was a famous trans worker named Cece in the seventies, that was hired to transform actors into grotesque monsters and hybrids for the movies, but she was young and didn’t really know how to control her own powers, so a lot of the actors ended up dying. She overdosed on heroin in her hotel room after a few years.

“Why did you come to me?” He’s been wondering about it for a while; surely Jaha, or her mom would be a better bet than some teenage guy at a prep school. Clarke stares at him like he’s an idiot, and then spells out W-E-L-L-S.

She’d been hoping he could save him. She must have known he would come to Phoenix. Bellamy wonders if she’d been following Wells, trying to tell him who she was, begging for him to help her. It makes sense she would have gone to her actual best friend first. Bellamy, after all, had only ever been a summer friend—she’d wander down to play with him while visiting her grandmother in Walden. He wasn’t a part of her actual life, casino towers in Atlantic City, and whirlwind trips to Europe. He was just some kid.

“Who’s the transformation worker, Clarke?”

She looks ready to reach for a letter, when the screen door opens downstairs, and Indra calls up ”Bell-o-me?” Indra always says his name like that, testing out each syllable. When he was little, she’d say Bell-o-me, Bell-oh, me? Bologna! like some sort of nursery rhyme.

“Upstairs!” he calls back, hurriedly tossing the stencils back in the box. He kicks the box back into the clutter when Indra pokes her head in. She takes in Clarke, looking regal and sort of pissed off, and the kitten, trying its hand at killing the blinds string. She doesn’t seem surprised to see the cats.

“Told that boy not to bother,” she grunts, and then narrows her eyes at Bellamy. “Seems to me, not a lot of cleaning’s being done around here.”

Bellamy rolls his eyes but stands without question. He follows his grandmother downstairs, tossing an apologetic glance back at Clarke. She looks furious. He shrugs.

He helps Indra clear out the dining room and kitchen, and then he heads down to pick up a couple slices of pizza from Diggs’. He has a greasy rotary-bin, which is really just a fancy term for a hot plate where he rests the pizzas he makes in a microwave in the back. Indra fetches Bellamy a Yeungling while they eat, and watch Band of the Banned. One of the Feds mentions Cece, which feels like too much of a coincidence, but Bellamy draws the line at accusing the TV of being in on a conspiracy.

The combination of hot, greasy food, beer, and actual exhaustion means that Bellamy doesn’t remember falling asleep. He wakes up on the couch, with a musty quilt thrown half-heartedly over him. Indra doesn’t like people to know she cares.

Bellamy calls her name as he sits up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He slept in his gloves, which means his hands are going to be uncomfortable all day. He peels the sticky leather off and tosses them to the floor. Indra doesn’t answer; she’s probably at her friend’s again. He heads upstairs.

Clarke is sitting in almost the exact square of floor space where he last saw her. She’s dug a few of the letters from the box, inadvertently scattering a few old wind-up toys and melted crayons along the way. It must have taken her ages, without opposable thumbs, and a single word is staring up at him. He thinks back to the last question he’d asked her.

Who’s the transformation worker, Clarke?

Bellamy stares at the answer she’s formed, and swallows thickly. Y-O-U.

It makes more sense to him than it probably should. The missing memories, spanning all the way from his early childhood. Thinking he’d killed Clarke. Why she wouldn’t have come to him, until absolutely necessary.

Why she came to him, in the end.

His mother used to say he was special, and he’d always thought she’d said it out of pity, because he was different. Because he was useless, because he had no curse. But all those times she’d called him her special boy, with that soft, smug smile—he gets it now.

So he falls to his knees, inches from Clarke, and says “How do I change you?”

Clarke blinks up at him, frustrated, he can tell. It’s a little strange to know he can read a cat’s facial expressions so well, but. He has several new talents, it seems.

He dumps the box out, not bothering with the mess, and scoots all the letters close to her. She spells out T-R-Y, in practically no time. She’s gotten good at it, but that makes sense. She was always a fast learner.

Bellamy puts a hand on each of her flanks, and she goes still and tense. That makes sense, too; she’s been oddly affectionate with him as a cat, but only because she knew he wasn’t aware of what he was. He didn’t know what he could do to her.

She knows. She remembers. The last time he touched her like this, intense and meaningful, he’d transformed her into a house pet. It probably isn’t a good memory.

She probably hates him. He would, in her place. He tries not to think about that.

Instead, Bellamy focuses on her fur beneath his hands. Soft, but a little gritty. He focuses on the feel of her bones, her four little paws, her whiskers tickling his inner arms. Her eyes, blinking up at him, and ears, twitching with nerves. Her tail lashes behind her. She’s trying hard not to fight, or run away. She’s trying to trust him.

He closes his eyes—it’s not necessary, he knows; he’s seen workers not even blink as they touch someone and curse them—but it feels like something he should do. He pictures Clarke as she was when he last saw her, curls chopped unevenly at her shoulders and bleached a silvery blonde because her mother hated the pink. Her eyes, ice-blue and sharp and perfect. Her lips…

Bellamy opens his eyes, but she’s still a cat. She meows, frustrated and impatient, but urging him on. Try again.

He dips his head against her spine, breathing her in. She smells like dirt and sunlight and the mildew of the old house. He wonders if she smelled like this, human. “I don’t know what to do,” he says into her side. “I don’t remember.”

The memory was stolen, or blocked. Either way, there’s no retrieving it, but he knows someone that he can ask, someone who was there.

And now he knows where that someone lives.

“I’ll be right back,” Bellamy promises, sitting back on his heels. Clarke glares up at him accusingly and, yeah, he kind of deserves that—the last time he said those words, she was carted away to animal prison. “I mean it this time,” he swears. “I’ll keep you safe.”

All at once, she’s leaping around the stencils, scooting them towards him a little viciously. U-B-S-A-F-E. Bellamy grins a little stupidly, and then feels like an idiot. He has a crush on a cat—sure, on the inside, she’s a gorgeous seventeen-year-old girl, but. He has a crush on a cat.

“You’re cute when you’re worried about me,” he grins, and goes to scratch her chin. She bites his finger harshly. “Point taken,” he says, and stands. “If anyone comes here before me,” he warns, “Hide under the bed.”

She blinks slowly up at him, as if to say yeah, I know, I’m not an idiot. Maybe he’s reading too much into her blinking.

Bellamy goes to snatch the Cadillac keys from where he left them the night before, but they’re gone. He glances out the window to see the drive is empty; Indra must have driven to wherever she is. Probably to keep him out of trouble. He pulls out his phone.

Here, he hesitates. It’s the middle of the school day for pretty much everyone he knows. Usually in this sort of situation, he’d call Murphy, but. Obviously, that isn’t an option.

His social circle isn’t that big. He’s not even sure it can accurately be called a circle. It’s more like a triangle, or maybe a line.

So he swallows his pride, and most of his sense of survival, and dials Raven. She picks up on the third ring. Somehow, everyone always picks up on the third ring.

“Hola,” she says, but not with any sort of accent. She sounds sort of bored. And pissed off. He’s starting to think that’s just her natural tone of voice.

“Uh, hey,” Bellamy winces. He seems to revert back to that awkward fourteen-year-old around Raven, or Raven’s voice. “I need a ride.”

“Seriously?” Raven asks, and he can practically hear her raised eyebrow.

“Yeah,” he says, firm. “Plus I thought you might want a study break.”

“Okay,” she decides. “I’m game.” He gives her the address and waits at the end of the drive. She pulls up in a beat up Astro Estate Wagon, with the crappy wood paneling from the seventies.

“Does it come with a flux capacitor?” he teases, sliding into the passenger seat. The floor all around his feet, and the entire back is littered with gas station receipts, fast food to-go bags, Styrofoam coffee cups, and he’s pretty sure a few sports bras, but he’s not about to ask. He pokes at a hole in the cloth hanging like old skin above his head.

“Shut your whore mouth,” Raven says, grinning. “You wish your ride had this much style.”

“True,” Bellamy agrees. He’d give a kidney for a working car of any kind, to be honest.

He opens up the saved address and directs her to the duplex Murphy led him to the day before. She looks up at it skeptically. “Nice digs,” she says, he’s pretty sure sarcastically.

Murphy’s Benz isn’t anywhere in sight. Bellamy shrugs. “Four walls and a roof,” he says, opening the door. “Let’s go.”

If Raven is at all surprised he knows how to pick locks, she doesn’t say. Just follows him in wordlessly, glancing around the barren front room in obvious distaste. “He never was much of a decorator,” Bellamy agrees.

“Your cousin’s a dick,” Raven chirps, flicking at a hideous vase-figurine hybrid, that looks like metallic seaweed. “With pretty much no redeeming qualities.”

“He has good teeth,” Bellamy says mildly, poking through the kitchen cabinets. They’re pretty much all empty, except for a few packets of microwavable popcorn and some fruit loops. The fridge is filled with Yeungling, but nothing else. A two-week old carton of milk sits on the counter, but when he opens it, it’s filled with cigarette butts.

“What’s up with the Memento theme?” Raven asks, pointing at the green, pink and yellow post-its littering the counters, cabinets, and walls. There’s one on the wall clock that just says TIMELESS. Most of the others are pretty obvious; TAKE OUT TRASH, and PAY ELECTRIC, but some are hard to decipher, like DOB 5/6/92, and CALL D ABOUT C. Bellamy recognizes the birthday as Murphy’s, and he figures D is probably Dax, while C could be Clarke. A few, like NO TOAST on the microwave are strange but not too cryptic. The apartment resembles one large desk calendar, kept by a meticulous PA or soccer mom.

Bellamy tugs at a photograph of him and Murphy—maybe when they were eight and fourteen, respectively—surrounded by the dull browns of the boardwalk. Murphy has his arm slung around Bellamy’s shoulders, while he’s trying not to look too happy about it. That was back when Bellamy thought Murphy was the definition of cool, and wanted to be just like him.

He pulls the picture from the fridge, held up by a magnet in the shape of a hotdog, that says #1WIENER. On the back, in Murphy’s meticulous cursive, is scrawled This is your cousin Bellamy, and you like him.

Bellamy wonders how important it was to Murphy, to get this message to himself down before he could forget to. So much that he probably went through all his old bags and boxes, searching for mostly-empty photo albums or piles of Polaroids, checking each one for Bellamy’s face. It could all be part of the con, so Bellamy tries not to think about the alternative. That it’s true.

It shouldn’t be this affecting, the sentiment like from someone he’s grown up with. Someone who convinced him that they were half-siblings when they were kids, like him and O, because cousins didn’t seem close enough, they had to be brothers. So what, Murphy likes him. If Bellamy took the picture, stuffed it in his pocket and walked away, his cousin might not remember him in the morning. He might not remember that they’re supposed to be close, supposed to be friendly. He might not remember he ever liked him in the first place.

Bellamy puts the photo back the way he found it.

Pens litter each surface, with the post-its. Pencils, too, and crayons and markers and a few glittery Lisa Frank gel pens. Scraps of paper and legal pads, too. Bellamy wonders what it must be like, to have a mind so fractured he has to write down anything important and hope he’ll remember to check it, hope he’ll know what the message means the next day. It almost makes him feel sorry for his cousin.

Then he finds the cage in Murphy’s bathroom—the old, wire kind that dog-catchers use. Old newspapers line the bottom, stinking of urine and vomit and shit. It’s crusted along the sides, and the floor, with paw prints stuck in like fossils. She’d had to sleep in it, to live in her own filth. There’s an ancient Tupperware bowl in the corner, but it’s dry and empty, probably for a while. He wonders how long Clarke had to go without food or water. How many days in a row, crying and meowing and calling for someone to save her.

He doesn’t feel sorry for Murphy, anymore. Now he wants to kill him.

“Ugh,” Raven groans, eyeing the cage with a glare. “What died in there?”

“A girl,” Bellamy growls, storming off to the other end of the apartment. Raven doesn’t ask him to explain. He wonders how much she’s guessed, already. Probably too much; she’s clever.

Murphy’s bedroom is as pristine as the rest of the place—sans Clarke’s cage—each surface clean of dust but littered with memos to himself. There’s a bookshelf along one wall, that holes only dozens of mead notebooks, pressed together wall-to-wall. He pulls one out at random, and sees the cover is titled JULY 2013-NOVEMBER 2013. He flips it open to the middle, and finds it’s some sort of diary. Murphy lists out his dream, what he wears that day, what he eats, even how many times he goes to the bathroom. He fills a page a day, and each notebook spans several months. These are his memories, Bellamy realizes. This bookshelf is Murphy’s brain.

He takes pictures of everything on his phone, and leaves the apartment the way he found it. He takes Raven out to lunch at Subway, before she drives him home. “I mean, it’s the least you can do, really,” she says around a bite of her mustard-rye-pickles-and-beef. Bellamy pops a cheetoh in his mouth, wiping the yellow-orange flakes off the cotton of his gloves (he hates cotton gloves) and nods. It really is.

When he gets back to Indra’s, it’s a little after four, and Octavia is there. He should have expected it, really, and she says as much, Clarke perched regally on her lap and clearly taking her side in things. Bellamy stares down at her, annoyed. He yanks off his gloves and tosses them to some unseen corner of the room—he fucking hates cotton gloves—before scooping the cat from Octavia’s arms.

“Bell,” Octavia snaps, but she’s interrupted by the sound of a car pulling up in the drive. Bellamy glances out the side window—Murphy’s Benz winks back at him in the sun. Clarke begins to growl in his arms, as he searches for a place to hide. “Bell?” Octavia asks, confused as he pulls old coats and stacks of scrapbooks from a nearby closet, one-handed.

“I promise, I’ll explain everything,” he hisses, folding himself into the cramped space, with Clarke curled up under his chin. “Just get rid of them!” He pulls the door as closed as it’ll go, around the pile of vomited sweaters and mold-stained rugs. He can still see a bit of the floor through the crack, but no more than that. He hears the screen door open and bang closed again, and the stomps of two pairs of boots.

“What are you doing here?” Octavia demands, sounding like a teenage girl annoyed at the sudden appearance of two older boys. The girl knows how to lie, Bellamy will give her that much.

“Hello to you too,” Murphy sneers. “Where’s your brother?”

“Not here,” Octavia snaps, hotly. “If that’s all, you can leave now.” Dax chuckles meanly, and the sound sets Bellamy’s teeth on edge. Clarke feels warm in his bare hands.

“Don’t be such a little bitch,” Dax says. He always manages to sound deadly serious, even when he’s supposedly kidding. Bellamy resists the urge to leap out and punch him; at least he’d have the element of surprise. “This isn’t your house.”

“It isn’t yours, either,” Octavia points out, and Bellamy loves her for never backing down, even to older boys twice her size. “But she’s my grandma, so you can get lost, asswipe.”

“Asswipe,” Murphy deadpans, “Clever. You learn that in your fancy rich-kid school? Thrown up in any bathrooms, lately?”

“Blown any teachers under the bleachers?” Dax asks, and Bellamy really wants to fucking punch him. Clarke seems to follow his train of thought, and digs her claws in him. Stay hidden, she’s saying. Stay safe.

Bellamy looks down, and he can just barely see the white outline of her face in the dim lighting. The blue of her eyes, the silver twitch of her whiskers. He couldn’t change her when he thought of her as a cat, and he couldn’t change her when he remembered her as a girl.

So he thinks of what she could be. He thinks of her with long curls, darker than they used to be. He thinks of her eyes, still bright blue but hardened. He thinks of her lips as fuller, and wider, with sharper, whiter teeth. He thinks of holding her, not with fur but with skin, soft and easy to hold. Easy to touch. Easy to kiss.

He thinks of kissing her, something he never did. It’s a desperate prayer, the kind kids do as a sort of last-ditch effort. If I don’t get in trouble now, I promise to never do this again. He wasn’t ever sure who he was promising, but those sorts of pleas never worked for him anyway. He always got caught. And he always did it again.

If I can hold you, he thinks, if you were human again, I would kiss you. I would kiss you until her lips hurt. I would kiss you until you bled. I would kiss you and kiss you and kiss you.

I would never let you go again.

It never works, and he never keeps the promise. He doesn’t expect it to work, now.

Except it does.

All at once, it’s not fur against his fingers, but skin, rougher than he imagined but still easy in his hands. He feels the scratch of snarled hair brush against his jaw, and he realizes his eyes are closed. He opens them.

Clarke is standing, pressed against him in the closet, completely naked. He expects her to panic, or run out and demand vengeance, without any clothes on. Instead, she stares back at him, eyes blue and bright and hard, mouth set in a firm line, cheeks tinged just a little so he knows that beneath the intensity, she’s still a little nervous. A little shy.

“What’s this?” Dax’s voice cuts through the bubble of silence between them.

“Don’t touch it,” Octavia orders, right as Murphy says “Is that Bellamy’s kitten? I thought they took it with the other one.”

Clarke goes rigid in Bellamy’s hands, and he tenses in hers. Her fingers dig into his shoulders, sharp and calloused. He can hear them getting closer to the closet.

“It’s trying to get in here,” Dax muses, sounding just inches away. Bellamy debates grabbing for a weapon—a wire hanger, or heavy lamp, something—and tenses for a fight. They’re caught; Dax will open the closet, and see them, see Clarke, and he’ll—

Bellamy’s thoughts dissolve as Clarke presses her mouth to his. It’s nothing like he imagined. She tastes like stale rainwater when it’s been collected and left out. But her mouth is warm, and her tongue is wet and sliding seamlessly against his. It isn’t awkward, like most first kisses. It feels inevitable. He doesn’t realize his hands have wandered down until she sighs into his mouth, and then he digs the pads of his fingers into the flesh of her thighs, pulling her up against him. Her fingers rise to twist in the hair at the nape of his neck, and her nails are long and sharp against his skin, but he almost likes the pain—certainly doesn’t mind it—and he barely swallows a moan as she presses closer.

It stops as abruptly as it started, when she pulls away with a wet pop as their lips separate. He stares at her dumbly as she combs through the winter jackets and old knitted cardigans, before coming up with a knee-length black raincoat, and shrugs it on. She’s making a good amount of noise, and he almost warns her to be quiet, but then realizes the voices have died down to nothing, and Murphy and Dax must have left.

“Why did you do that?” he hisses, even though all he really wants to do is tug her back in and lay her down on the pile of clothes, and take off that coat with his teeth.

“To shut you up,” Clarke says with a shrug. Her voice is hoarse, and deeper than he remembers, but it’s still hers.

She’s still her, and she’s here, with him in this closet. His fingers itch, and he clenches them into fists. She stuffs hers in her pockets, and shoulders open the door.

“I hope you have a fucking fantastic explanation, because I just had to—” Octavia’s irritated voice precedes her entrance, and now she’s standing in the doorway, staring dumbly at them as they trip their way from the closet. She’s holding the squirming kitten, stroking its back absently, eyes and mouth wide.

Bellamy would laugh, but he’s pretty sure he looks just as absurd—hair and clothes rucked up, mouth red and swollen, nails digging half-moons into the skin of his palms. Beside him, Clarke is barefoot in a black raincoat, with matted hair dark with grease and who knows what else, scratches all up her arms and legs and the pale skin of her neck, dark circles beneath her eyes. She still manages to look professional and perfect. He’s still painfully in love with her.

“Hey, O,” Clarke says, giving half a wave. She bends to scoop up a pair of elbow-length, purple velvet gloves with lint all over, and pulls them on.

“Clarke,” Octavia breathes, and then glances between her and Bellamy. “You were the cat,” she realizes. Then she seems to realize it all over again, because she says “You were a cat,” with a little more emphasis.

Clarke gives a wry grin. “Surprise.” Her mouth looks a little pink and swollen too, which Bellamy is only a little smug about. Mostly he feels nauseas. She’d only kissed him to keep their cover. She’d pulled away like he burned her.

“What,” Octavia pauses, trying to form a coherent sentence. Bellamy can relate, but he’d rather let her ask the questions. He’s not sure he could even find words. “How?”

Clarke glances to him with a raise brow. She wants to know if she can tell his secret, which. Well, it makes him a little hopeful. She doesn’t hate him, or else she wouldn’t care. She could run out and scream the news to the tabloids; transformation worker in New Jersey, here’s his name and street address and the color of his underwear. She could sell the information to every Fed and mob boss in the country. Hell, in the whole world.

But instead, she’s checking to make sure he’s okay with someone else knowing, okay with her saying it out loud. He loves her.

“Turns out I’m a trans worker,” he says, giving a shrug. “Who knew, right?”

“What the fuck,” Octavia snaps. The kitten’s gnawing at her hair, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

Bellamy sighs. “It’s kind of a long story,” he admits, eyeing Clarke. She seems remarkably put together for someone who’s spent the last three years of her life as a cat, held in captivity. She holds out a hand to him, and for one incredibly stupid moment, he thinks she wants him to hold it.

“Your phone,” she explains. “I need to call a friend, and go to Atlantic City.”

“What’s in Atlantic City?” Octavia asks, which is kind of a dumb question. Clarke’s life is in Atlantic City; she only ever lived in Walden for the summers. Her mother has a penthouse in the city, above one of Jaha’s casinos.

“My friend,” Clarke shrugs, taking Bellamy’s cell once he fishes it from his pocket. “I have to warn him.”

“Warn him about what?” Octavia demands, letting the kitten drop to the floor so it can sniff at Clarke’s foot, curious and confused. “What’s going on?”

Clarke glances between the siblings, lingering on Bellamy a moment before turning back to his phone. “There’s going to be a benefit this week,” she says with a frown. Her face goes cold and rigid. “They’re going to kill Jaha.”