Atalanta had managed to get herself buckled in with shaking hands, yet she still held on desperately when the pod took launch. The force of the launch had thrown her head against the back of her seat, and everything started to spin.

With her eyes closed tight, Atalanta sucked in breaths. I'm here, she thought to herself. I'm actually here, on the ship.

Her heart was slamming so fiercely in her chest, almost threatening to bust through. She grappled at her restrains so tight that her knuckles became white. It was all too surreal, sneaking past the guards to go to the ground. She could feel the ship vibrating beneath her feet and she couldn't believe that she was here and alive.

Internally, Atalanta panicked. Her mind raced, trying to think back to her medical training on Phoenix, when she would shadow Abby Griffin. She remembered a little girl. Her parents had been floated, and she was traumatized. She had trouble getting a grasp on reality, something that Atalanta has struggled with a lot in her past and was struggling with now.

"Alright," Mrs. Griffin had addressed the girl calmly. "Keep your eyes shut. Now deep breaths, sweetheart, deep breaths."

Atalanta clenched her eyes shut tighter. In, out, she thought to herself. In, out.

"Find something to focus on," Abby continued. Atalanta was training with Clarke, both of them at the bedside with Abby. "Focus on a happy place."

"A happy place," Atalanta muttered to herself, barely audible compared to the excited chattering of the prisoners around her. Close by, she could've sworn she heard someone saying her name, but she was too scared to open her eyes. "Find your happy place."

Suddenly, she was back on the Ark. Her mind carried her to Wells' living quarters, where they sat playing a game of chess. Clarke was there too, watching with a keen eye as Wells declared checkmate.

"You cheated!" Atalanta accused, frowning in defeat. "Clarke, tell him that he cheated!"

Clarke shrugged. "I wish I could. You know, Wells, it wouldn't kill you to lose for once."

Atalanta picked up one of the knights and pegged it at Wells, and he threw his hands up to shield himself. Clarke grabbed a piece as well, opening fire with Atalanta. Wells hollered out his surrender, all three of them giggling uncontrollably.

Atalanta's hands loosened on her restrains. They were only thirteen then. It seemed like so long ago when the three of them were all together, laughing and playing. With her eyes still closed, the corners of her mouth lifted in remembrance. She released a sigh of content. Sitting on the Exodus ship, she would soon be among the sky, but her head was already in the clouds. She mentally reached out for peace, delving further into her head.

The scene melted away and a new one appeared. This time, her mind took her to Rhett. She was with him, thoughtlessly running her fingers through his mop of hair. Her breathing became slower as she calmed down, just imagining the soft texture against her skin.

"Atalanta Reese," he would say, his voice filled with the passion of a supernova. "I love you more than the moon and the stars combined."

Atalanta opened her eyes. Inside her chest, her heart had finally stabilized. Her breaths came out even. She wasn't sweating anymore. As she slowly became aware of her surroundings, she realized that someone actually was saying her name.

"Anna," a voice said urgently. "Anna, it's me. You're ok, it's ok. Anna..."

Atalanta's vision cleared, and with a flood of relief, she saw those warm dark eyes that were so familiar to her. "Wells," she sighed. Maybe she knew what she was doing when she stumbled towards this seat.

"Atalanta," he exhaled. His eyes were wide with shock and anxiety. "I can't believe you're here."

When she initially saw him, she was at ease. But as she looked at his worried expression, a wave of anger came over her as she remembered the last time that she saw him. "Yeah, well, I had to be a bit creative to get on, since you took the fall for the crime that we committed," Atalanta snapped, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice. "I can't believe you, Wells! We were supposed to be arrested together, you know."

Wells sighed, scratching his head. "I'm sorry, Anna. I was trying to protect you. This...Earth...it's a suicide mission. I couldn't let you die in radiation too."

He gestured over to Clarke, who was sitting on his left. She was knocked out with anesthesia, which, Atalanta assumed, was because she put up a fight when they tried to board her. It was such a Clarke thing to do that Atalanta's heart swelled with the overwhelming urge to cry. She had missed Clarke. After they locked her up, Atalanta's dad would sometimes sneak her in to visit, but that ended after her father resigned from the guard.

Atalanta looked back at Wells and her anger started to dissolve. Him being here was such a Wells thing to do that her urge to cry increased. He'd always try to protect the ones he loved, even if it meant abandoning Atalanta on the Ark and riding to his death with Clarke.

Suddenly, too overcome with emotion, Atalanta broke out into a smile, tears about to spill. Wells observed her cautiously, confused. But as he saw her blue eyes light up, Wells couldn't help but smile too. "The three amigos are back?" he said, sounding unsure.

"Definitely," she replied with a nod, swallowing with a dry throat. "I couldn't let you and Clarke go to Earth alone. And..." Rhett's name hung in the silence, and Wells' expression darkened. He didn't say anything. A pit started to form in Atalanta's stomach. "Have you seen him?"

Wells shook his head, gulping as he watched the color slowly start to fade from Atalanta's face. "No," he said. He saw Atalanta's cute little nose wrinkle up in dismay, and he was quick to comfort her. "But don't worry, we'll find him."

He reached over and grabbed her clammy hand, and she held onto it tightly. She smiled at him appreciatively, glad that she didn't have to do this alone.

Next to Wells, Clarke started to stir, and Atalanta perked up. A completeness was forming inside of her, the unexplainable feeling of being reunited with her two best friends at once.

"Welcome back," Wells said. Atalanta offered a smile, examining Clarke carefully as she registered her surroundings. Her eyes focused on Wells and she scowled. Wells gulped, "Look-"

"Wells, why the hell are you here?" Clarke cut him off harshly, and Atalanta bit her lip. She had almost forgotten about the fight that Clarke and Wells had. Maybe it wouldn't be a happy reunion after all.

"When I found out they were sending prisoners to the ground, I got myself arrested. I came for you," Wells said. Atalanta squeezed his hand for encouragement. She knew that Wells never did anything wrong, but Wells made her promise that she wouldn't tell Clarke that. He said that the truth would hurt her even more than hating him would, so he made the ultimate sacrifice. For that, Atalanta would always put Wells on a pedestal. He was too good of a person to have to deal with any of this. He deserved better than being sentenced to a planet saturated in radiation.

"And Atalanta?" Clarke said in astonishment, blinking as if she were hallucinating. "Is that a guard uniform?"

Atalanta blushed, shifting in her large jacket. "It's my dad's old one. I had to sneak on somehow."

The ship suddenly jerked aggressively, and Atalanta released a scream. She instinctively tightened her grip on Wells' hand. His grip was just as tight. From around the ship, the other prisoners squealed in surprise.

"What was that?" Clarke asked, her mouth hanging open in fear.

"That was the atmosphere," Wells replied.

Overhead, a TV screen switched on, dragging Atalanta's attention away from Clarke. The Chancellor's face appeared, and Atalanta felt Wells tense next to her.

"Prisoners of The Ark, hear me now," Chancellor Jaha started, and Atalanta found a weird humor in the fact that she wasn't actually a prisoner. "You've been given a second chance, and as your Chancellor, it is my hope that you see this as not just a chance for you, but a chance for all of us, indeed for mankind itself. We have no idea what is waiting for you down there. If the odds of survival were better, we would've sent others. Frankly, we're sending you because your crimes have made you expendable."

"Your dad is a dick, Wells," someone shouted from across the ship.

Wells' jaw clenched and he turned his head the other way as the Chancellor proceeded with his speech. "If, however, you do survive, those crimes will be forgiven, your records wiped clean."

He rambled on with meaningless details about survival, but no one aboard was really paying attention. For next to Clarke, it appeared that someone had unbuckled their restrains.

"Spacewalk bandit strikes again!" a prisoner shouted.

"Go, Finn!" hollered another.

"Check it out!" they exclaimed.

Atalanta saw him, hovering in the zero gravity besides Clarke's seat. Something about the instability of space always scared Atalanta, and she gasped as she noticed the boy named Finn immaturely playing around in it. She recognized him, for her dad used to keep intel on all of the people that got arrested.

Finn looked up at Wells. "Your dad floated me after all."

"You should strap in before the parachutes deploy," Wells said, just as anxious as Atalanta was.

Nearby, others were eager to undo their restrains as well. "Hey! You two!" Clarke called. "Stay put if you want to live!" She was always nervous for the health of others, a quality that made her a natural doctor. She was just like her mother.

"Hey," Finn said, redirecting his attention from Wells to Clarke. "You're the traitor who's been in solitary for a year."

"You're the idiot who wasted a month of oxygen on an illegal spacewalk," Clarke shot back. Atalanta smiled to herself. When she first decided to sneak onto this ship, she was worried about the people she'd be on Earth with. She'd be undefended among murders. To her, it didn't really matter, knowing that it was worth it to be with Rhett again. But she did worry about her friends.

Although now, as Atalanta watched Clarke hold her own against Finn, she knew that she had nothing to worry about.

The ride was increasingly bumpier. "Stay in your seats!" Atalanta called out, wishing that everyone would stay still. Nobody payed attention to her, though, and right as a kid undid his straps, the ship jolted as the parachutes released.

Prisoners were thrown against the walls of the ship from the force, causing some pipes to come undone. Fog and smoke billowed up in the confined space, and Atalanta's throat tightened in terror. Everyone started to scream again, adding to the sharp hissing of the machinery to create a very loud scene.

"Finn, are you okay?" Clarke yelled over the noise.

Sparks flew overhead and the panic resumed in Atalanta's stomach. This can't be happening, she thought. I made it this far. I can't die now. I haven't even seen Rhett yet...

Next to her, she vaguely heard Wells and Clarke talking. She tried to listen in, hoping that the familiarity of a conversation between the three of them would calm her down.

"I'm sorry I got your father arrested," Atalanta heard Wells say, and she cringed.

"Not the time, Wells," she muttered, although she doubted that he could hear her over the ruckus.

Clarke shot him a murderous look. "Don't you talk about my father!"

"Please!" Wells tried. "I can't die knowing that you hate me!"

Atalanta's insides lurched at the mention of dying. It was too soon. She was too young for this. She wasn't even meant for this. She wasn't a prisoner. She volunteered for this. I'm insane, she thought to herself.

"They didn't arrest my father, Wells, they executed him! I do hate you," Clarke replied. She ignored him, looking past his shoulder to lock eyes with Atalanta. She must've noticed Atalanta's panic, for her face softened in the way that it did whenever she was working with patients. "We'll make it through this! It'll be ok, I promise!"

Atalanta, her mouth pressed into a firm line, managed to nod. She wiggled her hand out of Wells', finding it not stable enough to keep her from dying. Besides, she was clenching so hard, she didn't want to break his hand. So instead, she clung to her restrains.

And then with one last bounce from a defening crash, the yelling from the prisoners hushed down. The machines stopped humming. Everything was oddly quiet.

"Am I dead?" Atalanta thought aloud, breathing heavily. She peaked out of her eyes, looking around her. She realized it wasn't so quiet anymore, for the noise started to build back up as everyone started to unbuckle their seatbelt.

Atalanta could only sit frozen in her seat. Clarke, in contrast, jumped to her feet to check on the people who were flung around when the parachutes released. Atalanta's instincts told her to do the same, but she couldn't feel her legs.

"Finn, is he breathing?" Clarke asked.

Finn solemnly shook his head.

Atalanta heard voices from below as someone shouted that the doors were on the lower level. She numbly fumbled for her restrains. The ground. I made it.

"No!" Clarke shouted, abandoning the boy on the floor to join the gathering crowd. "We can't just open the doors!"

She started climbing down the ladder and Atalanta moved to follow, but she still battled her restrains. But then Wells was there, helping her undo the straps.

"Are you ok? Can you walk?" he asked, his face etched with concern as he put his arms around her shoulders to help her to her feet.

Atalanta nodded. "I'm fine. C'mon, we have to see what's going on."

Downstairs, she heard Clarke arguing that the air was toxic, her voice distinct above the others. "If the air is toxic, we're all dead anyway," another voice fought back. Atalanta's ears perked up at this, pushing Wells away as she hurried towards the ladder. She knew that voice.

She stepped on the ladder, the floor below her already filled with the prisoners. But she spotted him almost immediately, standing at the door, a sore thumb in his guard uniform. She grinned to herself, remembering how merely minutes ago he was the only thing that stood between her and getting to the ground. Now they were both here together.

"Bellamy?" a small voice called, and the boy in the uniform twisted around to watch as a brunette girl hopped off of the ladder opposite of Atalanta's. She dropped to the floor of the drop ship and pushed her way to the front to where the boy stood.

"That's the girl who hid under the floor," someone said, and Atalanta immediately knew what he was talking about. That was Octavia Blake. Atalanta's father was particularly upset when they had to arrest her. He always hated witnessing the unfairness of the council, and to find someone who had been hiding her whole life to keep her family safe had been the last straw for him. He resigned the next day.

"My God," the boy at the door said. The girl had called him Bellamy. Bellamy Blake, Atalanta recalled. Her brother. The pieces fell into place as Atalanta remembered reading Octavia's profile. "Look how big you are."

Octavia wrapped her arms around his neck, hugging him tightly. As she pulled away, she surveyed him. "What the hell are you wearing, a guard's uniform?"

Atalanta finished her climb on the ladder and tried to blend in with the crowd below. It dawned on her that the criminals in the room wouldn't be too happy if they noticed her guard uniform, too. She knew that several of the people here were convicted for assaulting guards, and they would jump on the opportunity if they thought that she was one.

"I borrowed it to get on the drop ship. Someone has got to keep an eye on you," Bellamy said, and Atalanta smiled to herself. Of course he would risk everything for his sister. She was glad that Bellamy had found her, whereas Rhett wasn't anywhere in sight.

Clarke said something to Bellamy that was drowned in the scuffling of the prisoners, but Octavia's voice was heard by everyone as she said, "Do you mind? I haven't seen my brother in a year."

"Nobody has a brother," someone said.

"That's Octavia Blake, the girl they found hidden in the floor," another person replied.

A look of annoyance crossed over Octavia's face and she lunged, probably fed up with all of the comments and wanting to punch someone in the face. Atalanta understood and felt sorry for her, not even being able to imagine what her life must've been like.

"Octavia, Octavia, no!" Bellamy caught her, trying to calm her down. "Let's give them something else to remember you by."

Octavia pushed off of her brother. "Yeah? Like what?"

"Like being the first person on the ground in a hundred years," Bellamy said, grinning. Octavia looked at him for a moment in thought before her face broke out into a smile. She stood next to Bellamy as he pulled the lever that opened the door of the drop ship.

Slowly, it lowered to the ground, like a drawbridge dropping to close the distance between a castle and a field. Except in this circumstance, this door was dropping to close a gap that hasn't been crossed in a hundred years. In this moment, they were eliminating the distance between Earth and space, and it was intense.

Atalanta was towards the back of the crowd, but it didn't matter as the light flooded in, filling up every dark crevice of that small space. Her mouth hung open in awe, her eyes wide as they soaked in their first view of real light, not that artificial crap she had been living with on the Ark. No-this light was real, and it was beautiful. Atalanta's breath hitched in her throat.

You learn about colors whenever you were little on the Ark, but Atalanta had never imagined that they would be so vivid. The greens and the blues and the browns, all mixing together like vibrant paint colors across a canvas, made everyone on the ship fall silent as they took it all in. Back home, it was all machinery and technology and gray drabiness. Here, it was what life was truly supposed to look like. As those doors opened, Atalanta was no longer the "little blonde Reese girl from Phoenix". That girl didn't exist anymore. That girl died when she left the Ark, and a new one was created when she landed on the ground. Her newborn eyes crinkled as they adjusted to the sun, her first moment of a life that was worth living.

Atalanta couldn't see Octavia descend down the ramp, but she could see the tops of her hands as she raised them to the brilliantly blue sky, as free as the green trees that swayed in the breeze. Oh, the green and the breeze. She was never a prisoner, but Atalanta had never felt more free than she did when the wind somersaulted through her hair.

"We're back, bitches!" Octavia screamed. Chorusing from around her, Atalanta and the prisoners finally expanded their lungs and shouted with the freedom of the ground, yelling at a volume that was considered "too loud" on the Ark.

Here, nothing was too loud. Nothing was was artificial. Nobody knew Atalanta Reese for who her dad was.

Here, everyone had a second chance, whether they were a prisoner or a stowaway. Here, reinvention birthed between these 102 sky people.

Atalanta was possessed with the biggest smile that had ever graced her face as everyone ran towards the fresh grass. She could only stay paralyzed to spot, not wanting to ruin the amazing moment. Next to her, a lanky boy with goggles atop his head scoffed.

"Screw Jaha," he said.

And despite the fact that she was never a prisoner, she suddenly felt mad, like she was robbed of a real life in her 17 years. She didn't have to be in a cell to be trapped.

She licked her lips with a sparkle in her eye. "Screw Jaha," she agreed. And with that, she ran for the new world with the speed of the singing birds the flew overhead.