Chapter Text
Clarke spent the rest of the night cleaning up her hastily-drawn map, showing in detail the rooms on each level and explaining to Bellamy what was where, making sure he knew where the important rooms were. Raven, on her end of things, got together a small kit for Bellamy which included a tone generator similar in design to the Mountain’s, one of her special converted flashlights and the special radio.
Meanwhile, Sinclair, Kane and Abby resumed their duties, with Sinclair going to hunt down anything electrical that could be used to build explosives timers, and Kane helping clean and prep the firearms while Abby handled the inevitable complaints and friction that came from having to covertly arm the Ark and thus take supplies away from people who would otherwise be using them for farming or related purposes.
“I would be very careful about messing with their computer systems,” noted Clarke. Bellamy had, in passing on the eight-hour trek back to the Ark, debriefed her on what went down in his time in the Mountain. One thing she recalled him mentioning was that they had fooled him about the acid fog pH meter.
Raven, looking up from the tone generator which she was doing some final checks on, called out, “Yeah, good point. If they have any networking or even if someone does a routine check they can undo what you do. Better to disable it mechanically. Like, damage a critical valve or something. Even better if it looks like an end-of-life failure.”
Bellamy nodded, his look of concentration not slackening once as Clarke then turned to some other aspects of the way the Mountain’s access control systems worked, then reminding him to also try to use natural moonlight whenever possible and avoid alerting anyone to his presence on his way there.
After Clarke finished taking Bellamy through his paces, she looked him in the eye and said, “There is one final important thing you need to know. No matter what they ask you in the Mountain, you are not empowered to negotiate terms of amnesty. You promise nothing. Got it?”
Bellamy frowned, but acquiesced.
“We haven’t even talked about any of that yet among ourselves,” Clarke noted. “And we have to consult the Grounders anyway.”
For her part, she decided only Maya and her father were a hundred percent guaranteed to be allowed a bone marrow donation and exemption from any crimes against humanity trials. The problem, she knew, was that if Bellamy even hinted at what terms would be dictated after the war, everybody who Maya and her dad couldn’t personally vouch for would still be clamoring that they’d done their part and resisted in some way.
Raven snorted. “Octavia’d say ‘float ‘em’. She doesn’t talk about it a lot, but ever since Clarke’s mom figured out how they make Reapers with that freaky programming she’s been pissed at what they did to Lincoln.”
Clarke sighed. “That’s for another day. It’s getting late.” To Bellamy, she said, “You need to leave after sunset tomorrow. Any outside observer who sees you must not be able to see your face. Keep to the tree cover. Be on the lookout for acid fog and use a parachute to cover yourself up if it hits.”
Bellamy nodded, took the kit from Raven and a spare tunnel map from Clarke, and left the room. Clarke stayed behind to examine her map on the plotting board and add any last-minute refinements she could remember. She marvelled that the other world, Lincoln and Bellamy had somehow managed to get to the mountain, unprotected and in broad daylight no less.
If they have outside observers, how many cameras do they have on the outside, too? wondered Clarke. In that other world, she had been counting on any external surveillance to make the Mountain’s leaders believe they only intended to attack through that door. But it had easily given the Mountain Men the information they needed to successfully implement Dante’s gambit of negotiating a separate peace, since they had to have seen Clarke and Lexa in front. Emerson’s tactic of drawing off Lexa’s small detachment had been a textbook trap disguising his real purpose – and what did it matter to him if he killed a few Grounders anyway?
At least, Clarke decided, Bellamy understood the importance of being cautious enough to not call attention to himself. If they have cameras on the tunnels they may not think him enough of a threat to do more than send a few Reapers after him, and if he’s careful he can use the tone generator without alerting them.
Clarke called, “Good night, Raven.”
Raven waved goodnight back, after which Clarke left and went to her quarters to try and get some sleep.
For whatever reason that night, Clarke didn’t dream at all after she lay in bed, letting herself slip away from the conscious world.
One moment, unconsciousness—
The next, her eyes snapped wide open and she jerked upright in her bed. She let the wave of dizziness pass, then carefully swung her legs around to put her feet on the floor and get up to start her morning routine.
After getting dressed, Clarke bumped into Octavia, who wore a look of determined anticipation, and sported numerous facial bruises she hadn’t had back in TonDC. She was dressed in full battle gear as well. Right, Clarke realized. Indra must have made her a second again.
Just in case, though, she put on a cheery grin and said, “Hey. What’s going on?”
Octavia nodded at her, not slackening her swift pace. “Gonna do some morning running. Indra says she’ll be coming today for me.”
Clarke, matching Octavia’s pace as they fairly marched down the corridor, raised her eyebrows. “Indra? Coming for you specifically?”
“Yes.” Octavia permitted herself a small smile. “She made me her second, and I’m not gonna let her down.”
“Looks like you got kind of a tough introduction,” Clarke ventured, gesturing vaguely at her own face to signify the bruises and cuts on Octavia’s.
By now, they were exiting to the outside. The star-lit twilight sky heralded a clear and cold morning to come. A light wind ruffled Clarke’s hair as she ambled alongside Octavia, who said, “That’s the first and last time I ever start a fight I can’t finish.” She stopped Clarke for a moment and nearly whispered, “Did you know Lexa told Indra to see if I should be her second?”
Clarke’s eyebrows went up. Lexa had remembered that?!
Octavia, misinterpreting Clarke’s expression, nodded in wide-eyed amazement. “They both believed in me, Clarke. I really need to prove I’m worthy of it – that I’m not just this dumb reckless Sky girl, you know?”
“For sure,” agreed Clarke. She looked around, noticing she could already make out the ground around her and the forest in the distance. Almost nobody was outside except for the security guards patrolling the camp perimeter fence. “So what do we do first?”
“C’mon.” Octavia tugged at Clarke’s elbow, and they began an easy, loping run that took them around the camp’s open grounds. As time passed and the day brightened, they began to speed up, their feet beginning to pound on the ground as they kept neck and neck with each other.
Clarke’s lungs burned as she heaved a hearty sigh and shifted on her chair, opposite Octavia outside the still in the gathering dawn. It was hard to mentally compare to the strength she’d gathered in her months outside of Arkadia (having to do a lot of walking and hunting had naturally improved Clarke’s fitness), but she judged that she was at maybe seventy-five percent compared to then. The month on the ground had already helped, of course, but she needed to regain the strength that accompanied her learned reflexes fighting and dodging very dangerous animals.
Octavia wasn’t breathing quite as heavily as she sipped at her water bottle. After recapping it, she handed it to Clarke and smirked. “I’ve been doing this for a few days now – you gotta keep up, Clarke!”
Clarke rolled her eyes and grinned, taking the water bottle and gulping down some of the water before handing it back to the other girl. The cool water was welcome, and the parched feeling in Clarke’s mouth receded. She said, “So what’s next?”
“Usually I do like, sword lunges and handstands and stuff. My technique’s probably total crap, but I’ve seen a bit of what the warriors do and Lincoln’s not bad himself, even if he says he doesn’t like the whole be-a-warrior thing.”
“Neat.” Clarke snapped her fingers. “Hey. Just remembered something. I need to get a few maps and give them to you to hand out to Indra’s chosen troops. We’re going to enter the Reaper tunnels and try to fan out through all of them, partly to grab all the Reapers we can and partly so if one group gets held up the rest of us can still make it. We’re also going to make small packages of stuff they can use, like smoke bombs, flashbangs, stuff like that. Raven’s going to show me how to use them and when I go see Lexa I can teach the grounder troops how to use them.”
Octavia grinned. “Cool.”
Clarke, remembering her insertion-team plans, said, “Also, now that you’re Indra’s second, you’ll be with me, Lexa and Indra on the first wave going into the Mountain.”
Octavia sat up, baring her teeth in a feral grin as she made a fist. “Yes!”
“But hey,” Clarke leaned forward and spoke in earnest. “Listen. You need to be in control, okay? I know you want to kill them for what they did to Lincoln. I get that. But this is only gonna work if you keep your head.”
Octavia frowned slightly. “I already learned that lesson, all right?” She pointed at the scar on her cheekbone. “You see this? Every morning I’ll wake up and see this in the mirror, and I’ll remind myself that if I start a fight, I’ll finish it. So don’t baby me, Clarke.”
Clarke leaned back in her chair and sighed, rubbing her forehead. “Sorry. I just – I don’t want to lose you or anyone else to this war. Okay?” She gave Octavia a pleading look. If only I could tell her what it had cost her in that other world to be in love with Lincoln – to have to be torn between her love for him and her love for Bellamy…
Octavia lowered her gaze and brushed her hand across the table, a contemplative look crossing her features as she seemed to ruminate. Lincoln was probably on her mind, Clarke thought, as one of the early casualties of the Ark versus Mountain war.
“Anyway,” said Clarke deliberately, “Let me go get you that stuff. Back in a few minutes.”
Octavia stood up as Clarke rose as well. She pointed to one of the large clearings in the camp yard. “I’ll be in the open area, doing some sword drills.”
It was a matter of a few moments to swing by the weapons production hall to greet Raven and Wick, then get a small bag containing a few smoke bombs and other odds and ends. Raven grinned. “They’re all really simple. They’ll have a fuse at one end you light up, and then you throw the thing and it goes boom. The round ones are smoke bombs and the rectangular ones are small flashbangs. We’re coming up with new things all the time, so consider these a small down payment for the troops.”
After that, Clarke swung by her room to deposit the ordinance in her locker and fetch some more hand-drawn Reaper tunnel maps, which she reminded herself to double-check with Lincoln later that day. For the time being, however, they would do, since the first groups should be crack troops capable of clearing the major arteries, which she definitely knew led to the decon and harvest chambers. She stuffed them in her pocket and went back to find Octavia, who was whirling about in a carefully elegant combination of lunges and sweeps as she swung her sword, pausing when she saw Clarke approaching her.
After Clarke quickly drew some arrows along the different paths each team should take and handed the maps to Octavia, some loud voices by the gate halted any further conversation; others who had started filtering out of the Ark also moved towards the gate. Once Clarke got a clear view, she nearly grinned. A horse-drawn cart, bearing Nyko and Indra, had drawn near, coming to a halt a few meters away from the gate. She looked to her left as she began walking, and saw that Octavia had quickly schooled her face into expressionlessness as the latter came along with her, matching Clarke’s pace. Octavia tugged at her coat and shrugged her shoulders to settle her sword a bit more comfortably against her back.
At the gate, Clarke nodded at one of the security guards. “Open it. I vouch for them.”
When the man hesitated, Clarke frowned and looked around, remembering she hadn’t really noticed David Miller before. She quickly spotted him and called, “Come on, David. Help me out here!”
The older man approached and said, “You know what Byrne and Kane both said about Clarke. Now do what she says and get that gate open!”
Finally, the gate was opened, and Indra called, “Okteivia kom Skaikru, gyon op.”
Octavia couldn’t quite keep the grin off her face, but managed to collect herself to respond evenly, “Wocha Indra, ai kom.”
Clarke stepped out with Octavia, and a short distance from the cart she embraced Octavia briefly, then stepped back to look at Indra and Lincoln as Octavia hopped onto the back of the wagon. Nyko nodded at Clarke and said, “We have also come for Finn. We will be sending him to Floudonkru to bring fish back for us – the arrangements have already been made. One of our usual travelling gonas will go with him and the two of them will haul the fish back. He will likely be gone one moon cycle – enough time to catch and salt enough fish.”
Clarke nodded. “Okay. Let me go find him.”
Nyko acknowledged that with a firm nod, and Indra settled back just a bit in her seat. Clarke turned to go back along the main pathway into the Ark proper. As she walked the corridors, she tried to find any remnant of the original intense sense of loss she’d felt for him; even knowing he wasn’t going to be gone permanently, she still couldn’t muster more than a sense of vague concern. The months since then – the intensity of her short relived relationship with Lexa – the renewed spark between her and this world’s Lexa – all had pushed those feelings into the background, into a world of almost-never-had-been.
At the door to Finn’s shared quarters, she saw him partly dressed already and in the process of getting his shirt on. As he tugged his shirt down, then brushed his hair out of his face, he looked at her, then did a double take; something in her expression must have given her away. Finn frowned. “Today’s the day?”
Clarke nodded and muttered, “Yeah. Nyko will take you to be met by one of Indra’s soldiers, and they’re going to send you to a group called Floudonkru – the Boat People. They catch fish, and the Trikru, I guess, trade them for it. You’ll help prepare the fish for Nyko’s village, and come back in about a month.”
Finn’s eyes bugged out. “A month?! I thought it was gonna be like, just a few days or something.” He stepped back, his movements uncertain as he looked around, instinctively trying to seek out an escape route.
Clarke stepped forward and snapped, “Damn it, Finn! You knew there would be consequences. On the Ark you know you’d have been floated for destroying food. Grow up and deal with it, because we don’t control how their system works – just consider yourself lucky you’ll come back in one piece, all right?”
“Okay!” Finn ran his hands through his hair and muttered, “Okay, geez! All right, just – just give me a sec.” He paced back and forth in the small room, reminding Clarke somehow of the time in the underground bunker after Charlotte had killed herself, when he'd begun losing control and lashing out, smashing the tables and equipment in it. Thankfully, all he did on this occasion was pace a few more times before stopping and turning to her.
Finn, still with a bit of a mulish expression on his face, grumbled, “Lemme get my coat on.” And so saying, he went to the locker in his room and shrugged into his well-worn black coat. He muttered, “Guess I don’t have a lot of choice about clothes.”
As Finn slowly walked out of the room, Clarke fell into step with him and replied, “I’m sure they’ll give you some. Lincoln said he knows someone there, and we know he wouldn’t deal with them if they weren’t nice people, right?”
Actually, reflected Clarke, she knew next to nothing about the Boat People and for all she knew their leader might end up treating Finn like a waste of space. Still, at least he was alive, and that victory would be one she would be counting for quite a while. The two fell silent as they went through the corridors, barely acknowledging the other people beginning to bustle about to and fro as they either aided with weapons production or went to join scavenging details for electrical parts.
Clarke and Finn found her mother and Kane outside, moving towards the gate to greet Indra and Nyko. Clarke tugged Finn along, increasing her stride to eat up the distance between her and them. They caught up about halfway to the gate and Clarke announced, somewhat out of breath, “Hey. They want Finn. He’s going to be gone for about a month.”
Abby and Kane both blinked at this news, then turned to look at Finn. “Are you ready for this?” she asked.
Finn grimaced. “I sort of knew it was coming, but … well, not exactly a lot of warning for this.”
Kane sighed and rubbed his forehead. “We should outfit you for this trip, Finn.”
Finn shook his head. “It’s not a pleasure trip they’re taking me on. They might take it all away from me or something.”
A cold gust blasted against Clarke’s face momentarily, and she shifted to let it push her hair out of her face. She spread her hands and said, “He’s probably right. I mean, think about it. They could’ve made me give him up that night, and unless I’d have wanted to start another war right then, I would have had to. At least this way, we know when to expect him back.”
Abby now sighed as well. “All right, then. Finn – may we meet again.” She held out her hand to shake, and Finn nodded and responded in kind, then shook Kane’s hand as well.
Clarke briefly hugged Finn, then escorted him to the horse and cart. Nyko called, “You may join Octavia in the back. I will not have you restrained unless you attempt to escape.”
Finn nodded and hurried to get onto the bed of the cart beside Octavia, who shifted a bit to let him on. As he settled in next to her, she leaned in and muttered something into his ear; he gave her a slightly alarmed look, but managed to settle down.
Indra leaned over and beckoned to Clarke, who approached and leaned in so Indra wouldn’t have to speak too loudly. In a low voice, Indra said, “Heda has a small camp in a ravine you can get to off one of the trails to the trading posts. She has drawn you a map.” She tapped the bench, and Clarke could see an unobtrusive folded piece of paper tucked in between the wooden slats of the front bench. Clarke quickly plucked it out and tucked it into the palm of her hand as she nodded and stepped back, to all appearances casually putting her hands in her jacket pockets to huddle against the still-chilly morning.
With that, Nyko set the horse to moving, and they made a slow, wide loop that took them near the fence, then back out along the wide trail going to the woods. Octavia sat unperturbed by the cart’s occasional bouncing, while Finn wore an uneasy grimace as they retreated from Camp Jaha.
Back behind the gate of the camp proper, Clarke went to the still again, got a small water ration and sat down. When a large group of workers began shuffling around her table to get to the bar for some breakfast rations (which she knew she ought to eat as well, but the “oatmeal” was a laughable imitation of the comparatively realistic stuff she’d had on the Ark proper), she quickly brought out her piece of paper and checked it. As she mentally overlaid the trail Lexa indicated with the trails on the map Lexa had given her the other day, she grinned. The base camp was reachable from Niylah’s trading post as well as from Camp Jaha, which meant she could take Raven along and disguise the real purpose of her trip again.
With luck, thought Clarke, the Mountain would never know what hit it until too late.