Homecoming

CHAPTER 18: Clarke

The mood in the Earthborns’ camp had shifted dramatically. As the sun sank, so did the fevered excitement that had made everyone’s blood run fast and hot during the confrontation with Rhodes’s men. They were still committed to protecting Bellamy—if anything, the encounter had made it clear how dangerous it would be to acquiesce to the Colonists—but their faces had grown grave, their voices hushed and urgent as they herded their children into their homes and bolted the doors.

Clarke was sitting outside the cabin, racing against the fading light as she prepared to repair the stiches Bellamy had torn during the escape. “Take off your shirt,” she said as they settled onto a patch of grass that lay beyond the lengthening shadows.

Bellamy looked taken aback as he turned his head from side to side, scanning the dirt road for people. “What? Here?”

“Yes, here. It’s too dark inside the cabin.” He hesitated, and Clarke raised an eyebrow. “Since when does Bellamy Blake have to be asked twice to take his shirt off?”

“Come on, Clarke. They already think I’m some insane fugitive who’s going to get them all killed. Do I have to be an insane, shirtless fugitive as well?”

“Yes, unless you want them to see you as an insane, dead fugitive. I need to fix those stitches.”

He sighed dramatically and, with his good arm, grabbed on to the edge of his shirt and pulled it over his head.

“Thank you,” Clarke said, suppressing a smile. As a patient, Bellamy bore a striking similarity to some of the little kids she used to treat back in the medical center. But that was one of the things she loved about him. He could be a deer-hunting, arrow-shooting warrior one moment, and a goofy kid splashing around in the stream the next. She admired the way he threw himself into every role, living every moment to the fullest. The last few weeks on Earth had been exhausting and terrifying, but also completely magical as she learned to see the untamed planet through Bellamy’s unexpectedly romantic viewpoint. Unlike most of the hundred, who’d always choose gossiping around the fire over exploring the woods, Bellamy seemed to prefer the company of trees to people. Clarke loved walking with him in the forest, watching his brash attitude slip away as he looked around in wonder.

She had Bellamy lie down while she threaded the needle she’d just sterilized over the fire. “Do you want me to see if they have painkillers?” Clarke asked, placing her hand on Bellamy’s arm.

He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “No. I’ve caused enough trouble already. I’m not taking their medicine.”

Clarke pressed her lips together but didn’t argue. She knew better than to go head-to-head with Bellamy when he was in one of his stubborn moods. She pressed a little harder on his arm, both to keep him still and to steady herself. “Okay. Take a deep breath.”

She slid the needle into his skin, forcing herself not to move as Bellamy flinched and groaned. The best she could do was to work quickly and accurately, and make the procedure as short as possible. “You’re doing great,” she told him as she brought the needle back around and prepared for a second stitch.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’re enjoying this,” Bellamy said through gritted teeth.

“Everything okay here?” a voice called. Clarke didn’t turn around, but she could hear Max, Wells, and possibly Sasha walking toward them.

“Super,” Bellamy said before she could answer. “Just indulging Clarke’s sadistic side. Pretty standard.” He let out another groan. “I let her do this to me every night.”

“Don’t move,” Clarke said. She tugged gently on the thread and watched in satisfaction as the skin pulled tight. “You don’t want me to slip and accidentally sew your lips shut.”

She could hear the smile in Sasha’s voice as she said, “You two make a strange couple.”

“Says the Earth girl dating a boy who fell out of the sky,” Bellamy managed through clenched teeth.

Clarke tied a small knot and snapped off the extra string. “All done.” She squeezed Bellamy’s knee to let him know to sit back up.

He looked down at the stitches and nodded. “Nice job, Doctor,” he said loudly so the others could hear. Then he smiled and pulled her close. “Thank you,” he whispered before kissing the top of her head, then reaching for his shirt.

“You should head inside,” Max said, shooting a glance at the trees surrounding the village. “I don’t think your people are going to cause any trouble tonight, but there’s no reason to make it easy for them if they do.”

Wells cleared his throat. “I wanted to talk to you about that. We know it’s only a matter of time before the guards come back, most likely with more people and a lot more guns. And from what we know about Rhodes, he won’t be overly concerned about hurting innocent people. He’ll consider harboring Bellamy to be an act of war.” He paused and glanced at Sasha, who gave him a small nod. “I think it’d be safer to move everyone back inside. Underground—into Mount Weather.”

Max stared at him. “Underground,” he repeated bitterly, twisting his mouth just as Rhodes did when he said the word sister.

“It’s a fortress, isn’t it?” Clarke said. “If it could keep out a hundred kilotons of radiation, surely it could keep out a few guards.”

Max shot Sasha a look Clarke couldn’t quite read, but it was enough to make her bite her lip nervously. When he spoke, his voice was strained. “We’re well aware of Mount Weather’s capabilities. Our people lived there for centuries, entire generations entombed. They lived and died without ever glimpsing the sky. When we finally came back above ground, we vowed to stay there. We’d never let anything—or anyone—force us underground again.”

As someone who’d grown up on a space station, who still got a thrill from her first breath of fresh morning air, Clarke could understand where Max was coming from. But if it came down to living underground or dying above, then the choice was clear. “Rhodes isn’t going to stop until he gets what he wants,” she said. “And he won’t care how many of your people he has to kill along the way.”

Max’s face hardened. “We’ve fought off attackers before,” he said. “We know how to defend ourselves.”

“Not against people like this,” Wells said. “These are trained soldiers—a small army. I know the other Earthborns are dangerous, but they’ve got nothing on Rhodes’s men.”

Max fell silent, and although his expression remained stern, Clarke could tell he was considering Wells’s words.

Sasha spoke first. “Dad, we should listen to Wells. He knows what he’s talking about. I don’t want to go underground any more than you do, but in this case, I think it’s the right thing to do.”

Max stared at her with a look of mild surprise, then something in his face shifted, as if he were looking at his daughter in a new light, accepting that she’d gone from child to confidante. Clarke’s heart throbbed painfully as she thought about her own father and the long hours they’d spent discussing Clarke’s medical training or his own research. In the year leading up to his arrest, he’d begun treating her like a trusted colleague, a friend. Would she ever get the chance to tell him all about her adventures on Earth? Would she ever get to share the questions she’d been saving especially for him?

Finally, Max nodded. “Okay. We’ll do this calmly. And we need to emphasize to our people that this is only a precaution. We’ll send out the signal and get everyone moving right away. Wells, you come with me. You can brief us on Rhodes and his strategy while we evacuate.”

After conferring with some of his advisors, Max decided to move everyone inside Mount Weather that night. He sent a few engineers ahead to make sure that the fortress was ready for an influx of people, and spent the rest of the evening going from house to house, explaining the situation.

By midnight, everyone in the community had gathered at the base of the mountain, prepared to spend the night in its depths for the first time in decades. Most people carried food and clothes, leading children who clutched their favorite toys.

Max stood by the enormous metal door built into the hillside, which had been propped open to let the stream of people file in. Bellamy and Clarke hung back until nearly everyone was inside, as did Wells, who was standing watch with Sasha. “Is there anything I can do?” Clarke asked Max as they approached.

“Just make sure everyone’s settled. There are more than enough rooms, but some of them are hard to find. If anyone seems lost, you can tell them to wait for me. I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

Clarke nodded, took Bellamy’s hand, and led him through the door and down the first flight of steep, narrow stairs that seemed to descend down into the belly of the Earth. They’d both been inside Mount Weather before, but that was when they’d believed the Earthborns were their enemy, so they hadn’t spent a great deal of time admiring the incredible setup. This was no dark cave—this was a sophisticated bunker that had been built by the best engineers in America to withstand the Cataclysm.

Clarke and Bellamy made their way down the first residential corridor, a brightly lit hall lined with bedrooms on either side. At the end, a woman stood holding the hands of two small, scared-looking girls. “Do you need any help?” Clarke asked.

“All these rooms are full,” the woman said, a note of anxiety in her voice.

“Don’t worry. There’s a whole other section the next level down,” Clarke said. “If you just wait here, I’ll run ahead and find it.”

“My doll’s tired,” one of the little girls said, holding a wooden toy in the air. “She needs to go to bed.”

“It won’t take long. And you know what you can do in the meantime? You can tell my friend here all about your doll.”

“What?” Bellamy shot her a look. “I’m coming with you.”

“No extraneous activity for you. Doctor’s orders.”

Bellamy rolled his eyes, then sighed and turned to the little girl. “So…” she heard him say as she hurried off. “What’s your doll’s favorite way to hunt? Does she like spears or bows and arrows?”

Clarke grinned to herself as she imagined the look of confusion on the little girl’s face, then took another flight of stairs down and turned in the direction she assumed led to the bedrooms, but the layout of this floor was different than the one above. She backtracked and tried going the other way but ended up even more turned around.

The corridors looked different in this wing. It had fewer doors and seemed more utilitarian, like it’d been built for equipment or supplies. Sure enough, the first door she reached had a sign reading PHYSICAL PLANT OPERATIONS: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Since anyone authorized to open the door had been dead for at least a couple hundred years, she figured there was no harm in sneaking a peek. She jiggled the handle. It was locked.

Clarke moved along to the next door, on the opposite side of the hall. RADIO COMMUNICATIONS: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY the sign read. Clarke froze. Radio? She hadn’t thought about it before, but of course people would have wanted a way to communicate if they were locked down inside Mount Weather… but who would they have communicated with? If they were using this room, then presumably there wouldn’t have been anyone left to take the call. Unless… had there been other bunkers maybe? Other versions of Mount Weather?

Clarke stared at the door for a long moment, a strange, distant thought tickling the back of her mind. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but something about this door—that sign, those words—felt familiar. She tried the handle, but this room was locked too.

“Clarke? Did you find more rooms?” Bellamy’s voice was faint, but there was a tinge of worry to it. “Clarke?”

“I’m here,” she called back, spinning around and hurrying down the hallway toward his voice.

They finished helping everyone get settled, then went with Max, Wells, and Sasha to take inventory of the supplies. On their way to the old cafeteria, Max explained to them that his people had kept Mount Weather up and running all this time, just in case of an emergency like this.

“So you’re pretty familiar with this place, then,” Clarke said.

“I was born down here, actually,” Max replied, to her surprise. “I was the last Mount Weather baby. A few months after I was born, it became clear that the radiation levels were finally safe, and we all moved back to the surface. I still spent a lot of time down here, though. It was my favorite place to explore because the adults hardly ever came inside.”

“I can imagine. So, speaking of exploring,” Clarke said carefully, trying not to sound like she was snooping. “I found a radio room today. Do you know what it would’ve been used for?”

“Mostly for fiddling with, honestly,” Max said with a shrug. “Every generation has had a system for sending out signals on a regular basis. But no one—not once—has gotten a reply. As far as we could tell, there was just no one out there to respond.”

Clarke felt an unexpected wave of disappointment, but then another question surfaced through her sea of confused thoughts. “Did the scientists who came on the first dropship use it?”

Max looked at her quizzically, as if trying to figure out where she was going with her questions. “Actually, yes. Well, they tried anyway. They asked a lot of questions about the radio, and I even let them in to try it out but I told them what I just told you—”

Clarke cut him off. “You have the key?”

“Yes, I have the key. Do you want to go in?”

“Yes, please. That would be great, actually.”

Bellamy shot Clarke a questioning look, but she looked away, letting her mind wander in pursuit of a memory she wasn’t sure was ever hers to begin with.

Clarke forced herself to take a deep breath, just like she did before assisting Dr. Lahiri with a complicated surgical procedure. But this time, she wasn’t about to use a scalpel to expose someone’s tricuspid valve; she was bracing herself to enter the Exchange.

Clarke hated the vast hall that was always packed, no matter when you went. She hated haggling for a good price, and she really hated having to make small talk with the attendants, pretending like she cared whether a T-shirt was ten percent earth fibers or fifteen. But it was Wells’s birthday tomorrow, and Clarke was desperate to find him the perfect present.

Yet just when she had gathered the courage to step inside, Glass and Cora came her way, prompting Clarke to duck around the corner. There was no way she could pick a present for Wells with them watching, making loud comments about her selections as if she couldn’t hear them. She’d just have to come back later. They were scrutinizing scraps of fabrics with the same care Clarke reserved for tissue samples in the lab.

“I just don’t see any harm in looking.” A man’s voice drifted down the hall, making Clarke stop in her tracks.

“David, you know there won’t be anything even close to what we need at the Exchange. All that technology was snatched up years ago. We could check the black market on Walden, if you think it’s worth the risk.”

Clarke’s breath caught in her chest as she peeked around the corner. It was her parents. Clarke’s mother hadn’t gone to the Exchange in years, and she couldn’t remember her father ever going. What in the world were they doing here in the middle of the day, when they were supposed to be in their respective labs?

“The radio works,” her father was saying. “We just need to find a way to amplify the signal. It’ll be simple, really. We just need a few pieces of equipment.”

“Which is all well and good, except for the fact that there’s no one on the other end to hear us.”

“If anyone made it to Mount Weather, or to one of the CDC bunkers, then they have access to a radio. We just need to make sure—”

“Do you know how crazy you sound?” her mother said, lowering her voice. “The chances of it working are infinitesimally small.”

“But what if I’m not crazy? What if there are people down there, trying to make contact with us?” He fell quiet for a moment. “Don’t you want to let them know that they’re not alone?”

To their credit, Bellamy, Wells, and Sasha didn’t balk when Clarke told them about her parents and how she thought they might’ve known about the radio in Mount Weather. It was crazy, but no crazier than Bellamy and Wells discovering that they were brothers, or Clarke learning that her parents had been on Earth the entire time she’d been mourning their deaths.

Max unlocked the door with a loud click. The door creaked open on old hinges. He stepped aside and held out his arm, signaling for Clarke to enter. She took a hesitant step inside. It was small, no more than three or four people could fit comfortably, and one entire wall was covered with speakers, switches, and dials. The other three walls were hung with various instructional signs. Clarke’s eyes landed on a poster that showed various flags next to long strings of numbers. The labels read:

PARLIAMENT HILL, OTTAWA

CENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL

10 DOWNING STREET, LONDON

PALACIO NACIONAL, MEXICO CITY

CIA

MI6

KANTEI, TOKYO

KREMLIN, MOSCOW

“When was the last time you tried to send out a signal?” Clarke asked.

“About a month ago,” Max said. “We’re due to try again in a couple of weeks. But honestly, we only do it as routine maintenance, mostly to make sure the equipment is still working. There’s never been so much as a blip, Clarke.”

“I know. But that doesn’t mean my parents weren’t onto something. Maybe being in here and using the same equipment they did will help me figure out where they went.”

“Well,” Max said, nodding, “I’ll leave you to it, then. Good luck.”

Clarke walked over to the controls, her hands trembling. To the right, a tall stack of equipment towered over the room. Cables and cords of every color and width poured out of it like tentacles. Clarke ran her hands over the machinery, too afraid to push any one thing. She studied the markings, combinations of letters and numbers she’d never seen before: kHz, km, GHZ, µm.

One switch seemed straightforward enough: It read ON/OFF. Clarke took a deep breath and flicked it up with a snap. She sucked in her breath as the whole apparatus lit up like it had been shocked to life. Lights flashed. Its guts seemed to whir and grind. Clicks and crackles emanated from somewhere deep inside. Then, a low, soft hiss filled the room, growing louder and steadier. It was mesmerizing—the sound of possible life out there, somewhere. Clarke could tell why her parents would have come here. They would have wanted to see for themselves, to hear the vastness of this planet with their own ears. To hear the sound of hope.

She spotted a small drawer under the console. She tugged it open and to her surprise found a small booklet. It was a manual. The pages crackled as she opened it and ran her finger down the instructions.

She could have spent all night in the radio room. She had no idea how much time passed while she pushed buttons, gently nudged dials a millimeter or two in one direction or another. And each time she made the slightest adjustment, the hiss changed, just a tiny bit. It was almost indiscernible, but Clarke could hear it. It was like the subtle distinction between the accent of a Phoenician and a Waldenite. And in each moment, she felt something she never dreamed she’d feel again—the presence of her parents. They had listened to this same endless sound. They had tweaked it and plumbed its depths for hints of a life outside Mount Weather. She just had to spend enough time here to figure out what they had discovered—and where it led them.

By the time Bellamy came to check on her, Clarke was practically giddy with excitement.

“How’s it go—” Before he could finish, she’d ran over and thrown her arms around him, prompting him to laugh and groan all at once as he gave her a one-armed hug.

“Sorry,” she said, blushing. “Some doctor, right? Are you okay?”

He grinned. “I’m fine. So, what did you hear on that thing that’s got you so excited?” he asked, gesturing toward the radio equipment.

“Nothing, just empty air,” Clarke said with a huge smile. “It’s amazing!”

Bellamy furrowed his brow in exaggerated confusion. “Uh, I know I’m no scientist or anything, but how is that amazing?”

She swatted his good arm. “The fact that it’s working at all means I have a lead, finally. My parents thought there could have been more people out there”—she waved her hand up at the ceiling, at the world above them—“somewhere. And maybe this radio told them where to go next. I just have to figure out what they discovered. It’s a start at least!”

“Wow,” Bellamy said, beaming at her. “Clarke, that’s incredible.” But then his smile faded as a shadow of worry crossed his face.

“What’s wrong?”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to be a total buzzkill,” he said apologetically. “And I’m really glad you found a lead. But that doesn’t change how dangerous it is out there.”

She grabbed his hand and interlaced his fingers with hers. “I know. But that’s not going to stop me.”

“Then I’ll go with you.”

Clarke smiled. “I was hoping you’d say that.” She rose up onto the balls of her feet to kiss him.

“In fact, we should go soon. Tomorrow. Now.”

Clarke stepped back to stare at him. “Bellamy, what are you talking about? We can’t go now. Not after an entire village decamped into a mountain to keep you safe.”

“That’s the point. They shouldn’t have done that. No one person is worth jeopardizing a whole society and definitely not me.”

“We went over this,” Clarke said, squeezing his hand. “It’s more than—”

“Clarke, just listen, please.” He sighed. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s just—not a lot of people have loved me in my life. And it seems like every time someone cares about me, they get hurt. My mom, Lilly, Octavia…” He trailed off.

Clarke’s heart ached for the little boy who had no one to look out for him, who grew up too fast. “Do you think if they knew that beforehand, it would have changed their love for you one tiny bit?” Clarke asked, holding his gaze.

“I just… I just hate being the reason people are always in danger. I’d never be able to live with myself if anything happened to you.” He ran his finger along her cheek and gave her a sad smile. “I’m not like you. I can’t stitch you back up again.”

“Are you serious? I was a mess when I got here, after everything that had happened with my parents, Wells, Lilly… and then Thalia. I was broken, and you put me back together.”

“You weren’t broken,” Bellamy said, his voice soft as a caress. “You were the strongest, most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. I still can’t figure out what I did to get so lucky.”

“What do I have to do to convince you that I’m the lucky one?” She kissed him, harder than before, letting her lips convey everything she hadn’t found the words to say.

Bellamy broke away, then placed his hand on her waist and grinned. “I think you might be on the right track. Though I could probably use a little more convincing.” He pulled her to him, then stepped backward so he was against the wall, laughing as she grabbed on to his shirt and began to pull him down to the floor.