Chapter 4:

"Shit," I whispered. My eye widened behind the scope of the rifle as I took in the size of the army marching into the mountain pass. This was the first really good look I'd got at Ontari's army, and I realized that Lexa had clearly undersold it. It was, as she'd predicted, a much larger force than she'd marched on Arkadia back when they'd been trying to force us to surrender Finn, but her words didn't come close to doing it justice. I don't think I'd ever fully appreciated the amount of restraint Lexa had showed before, perhaps because it didn't seem that way at the time. But I now realized that she could easily have commanded this many people to march if she'd wanted to, and there would be no way that Arkadia could hold them off. An army that size could slaughter every living thing in the camp, and still have enough soldiers left over that they could grind the entire city down to the bedrock it lay on, just for shits and giggles. This was not a force sent to contain or intimidate. You only amass a force this size if you have the singular goal of exterminating an enemy.

I slid backwards a few inches and pulled a mottled gray blanket over myself, making sure that the objective lens of the rifle scope was covered. With the sun just under the south ridge of the valley, the chances that they would see a reflection off of it were remote, but I felt it was better safe than sorry. From my position high on the south wall of the valley, I quickly let my eyes trace over its opposite, where I knew Lexa held a similar post. Like me, and the others, she lay on the slope under a blanket that blended in almost perfectly with the granite wall behind her. From where I was sitting, my eyes scanned back and forth across the rock face. Even knowing approximately where she lay, I couldn't find her. That was good, not that there was anything we could do about it if I could. None of us carried radios and there would be no way for me to warn her of her visibility if I did see her. The entire plan depended on them marching right past Lexa and I at the opening of the mountain pass without noticing us. If they spotted either one of us before the bulk of the army entered the pass, not only would the plan fail, but Lexa and I would almost certainly be very, very dead.

To her credit, Lexa had taken to riflery pretty well. She wasn't a sharpshooter by any means, but long experience with archery and knife throwing had trained her eye well. She also had survived this long by training her mind and body to work almost as one, a skill critical for target shooting. She'd had a look of grim determination as we'd plotted our attack, and behind her green eyes, I knew she was reliving the deaths at TonDC. She wasn't commander anymore, but these were still her people. People she'd led for years until I'd taken it from her. Now, she fully intended to fire upon them with every intention of killing some and wounding countless others.

I felt, as much as I heard or saw, the leading line of army pass by my tiny outpost. They didn't march in unison, as one would expect of a well-organized militia, instead, although they advanced together, each warrior marched at their own pace. I couldn't even make a reasonable guess as to how many there were. Thousands, definitely, but how many thousands was anyone's guess, and I didn't dare peek out from under cover to try to make a better guess. Not that it mattered much. We wouldn't be any less dead going toe-to-toe against an army of one thousand than we would against an army of a million, but that wasn't really the plan anyway. For our purposes, it was enough to slow them down. Our entire plan hinged on buying enough time for the rank and file grounders to realize that Ontari was not a suitable commander. It was about making sure that nobody was willing to stand between her and Lexa when the time came. Lexa had taken me aside to reiterate her concerns for the eventual face-off, but that was a problem for a later time. Now we had to make sure we all lived through the next forty-or-so minutes. After that, we could start figuring out how she was going to defeat the entire lineage of commanders, including herself, in single combat.

For now, the lynch-pin to the entire plan was Murphy. He would shoot first as the army approached the exit to the valley, then he and Niylah would systematically try to herd them back towards the entrance they came in through. The hard part was figuring out how to convince an entire army that a force of four was both much larger, and held a much better tactical position than they did. On that front, Lexa's insight into the psychology of the commanders had been vital.

With no small amount of mental effort, I kept my breathing slow. I needed my eye keen and my hands steady. We would get exactly one shot at this, and it was going to happen fast. With an almost casual motion, I thumbed the selector on my rifle down two notches, setting it to fire bursts of three shots. It wouldn't be long now.

Walled off by hard granite faces, the deep valley offered nearly perfect acoustics. From just a little less than mile away, I could hear the unmistakable report of a rifle, followed by a loud explosion. Murphy, my brain reported automatically. I could almost feel the ripple of confusion run through the vast army that seemed practically close enough that I could reach out and touch them. A second explosion rang out, followed by the sound of a massive landslide.

Now it was my turn. Still under the blanket, I rose to a low crouch and took aim at the base of a small rock, a little lighter shade than the ones around it. Not enough that you would notice if you didn't know it was there, but I'd placed it there specifically so I would have something to aim at. Almost simultaneous with my gentle squeeze of the trigger, a column of flame and debris rose upward, and a fraction of a second later, the sound and shockwave slammed into me. I ignored it, and swung my rifle a few degrees to the right and fired again. A second explosion rocked the valley and forced the trailing warriors in Ontari's army forward. Behind me, I heard a second explosion echo up from the far end of the valley as I fired at a third and fourth. Finally, I swung up to the cliff face on which I was crouched, and aimed at the base of a large boulder. This explosion was larger, not designed to startle or herd the army, but to dislodge the massive boulder under which the bomb sat. I watched with some satisfaction as a rockslide was triggered, sending an avalanche of boulders both large and small towards the line of explosions I'd triggered only seconds before. It finally came to rest as a long pile, about six feet tall, stretching most of the way across the opening of the valley floor. Not enough to cut off their escape, but enough to make it harder. That had been Lexa's addition to the plan. In her opinion, they needed to feel trapped, without actually being trapped. If they escaped, and that was the plan, it had to be hard enough that the army would pass up their survival as dumb luck rather than any skill or strategic acumen on the part of the Commander.

The irony that it was Pike who had taught us to build a broad range of improvised explosive devices was not lost on me. Somehow, though, I don't think that this is quite what he'd had in mind when he'd covered it in Earth Skills. After all, we all expected the ground to be uninhabited when we were first sent down. Notwithstanding all that, though, there were countless survival situations where the judicious application of explosive force could be the difference between life and death. With some of the supplies Niylah had been able to trade from Mount Weather, it was actually pretty easy to prepare some reasonable, if unstable, pipe bombs that would detonate upon being hit by a high-velocity bullet, but probably wouldn't detonate from having an army march over them. Probably. For all I knew at the time, we might have made the improvised equivalent of a land mine.

As I thumbed my rifle into fully automatic mode, I heard Lexa open fire on the army below. From behind me, I heard commotion rise as I heard two more rifles open up with fully automatic fire, as well as a new series of explosions. This was Murphy and Niylah trying to herd them back the way they'd come. We'd set up a line of improvised pipe bombs on either side of the valley, and they were detonating them one at a time, starting at the far end of the valley and moving towards Lexa and I. Below, I could see any sign of decorum in Ontari's army disappear, and the scene descended into panic. As Lexa fired, I reached down below me and lit a small fuse. With any luck, it would set off a long line of small "poppers." None of them were large enough to cause any damage at all, but in the valley, with a panicking army below, they would sound close enough to gunfire to produce the illusion that there was a line of gunmen extending from my position.

From her perch, Lexa was firing in long, s-shaped curves through the army below, stopping only to reload as she further fueled the panic that rose like a crescendo from below. I let my fully automatic fire join hers.

From below, I heard panicked cries of Teik oso rowenes laud. Sound the retreat. But sounding it almost seemed unnecessary. The army was already rushing back the way they came, frantically trying to climb over the barrier that had been left by the rockslide. A few had the presence of mind to fire their bows at the rock face that trapped them, but they were firing blind. They didn't know how many shooters there were, or where they were hidden. All they knew was that whoever it was held the higher ground, had them pinned down, and had pulled off a perfect ambush. Realistically, their only option was to retreat and regroup.

For our part, we kept firing. If Niylah and Murphy were following the plan, they would be methodically working their way back up the valley, firing at the tail end of the army as it tried to make its escape. The plan was for them to shoot sloppy. Hit on occasion, but miss close if you can. Close enough that they would hear the ricochets of the bullets, and see where they hit. The goal was not to kill them, but to drive them. Keep them from having a chance to stop and collect their thoughts. Nevertheless, I knew, people were dying down there. Some were shot, others wounded. Others still were undoubtedly trampled by the panicked army trying to make good their escape. There was no way of knowing how many were injured or killed until the last of the thundering footsteps echoed to silence, and those who remained still lay motionless on the valley floor.

Twenty-seven. Twenty-seven who were dead or would be soon. Some of them might have a real shot at survival if we brought them back with us and treated them, but if we did that, they would know it wasn't Pike and his men who did this. Instead, we had to leave them to die, never knowing who it was who killed them, and not knowing that they paid with their lives just to buy us a few extra days. Hundreds of warriors at the drop ship. More hundreds at Mount Weather. Now twenty-seven more lay dead in a desperation play to save lives.

"Yu gonplei ste odon," I muttered under my breath. At some stage, you just have to accept that the scales will never level. I had so much blood on my ledger at this point I knew I could never make up for it. All I could do was to make the best decisions I could, then hope that history would be more forgiving than I am.

-x-

I was the last to make it back to Niylah's trading post. We'd each taken different routes back to reduce the chances that we would all get caught together. On top of that, I'd waited almost an hour on my outcropping just to make sure that they didn't try to march again. As Lexa had predicted, they didn't. It seemed very unlikely that they would try to march through this valley again. Even if Ontari ordered it, her warriors wouldn't be eager to march into what had been a death trap only hours before. Or at least, that was the plan.

They had already doffed their gear by the time that I walked through the door. There was virtually no talking amongst them. Instead a sober silence hung over the trio. None seemed in the mood to celebrate. They all looked up in unison as they heard me enter. I'd been moving, in the dark, as fast as the terrain would allow, and I was exhausted.

Lexa was the first to rush forward, wrapping me in her arms before she helped me into the darkened back room. "Ste yu ait? Oso ste get yu daun. [Are you okay? We were worried.]"

As I looked over her shoulder where Niylah looked decidedly uncomfortable, trying to look at pretty much everything but us, I gently untangled myself from her embrace. "I'm okay," I replied, tiredly. I'm not going to lie: it was tempting to just let my body sag into her embrace, but things were already tense enough between me and Niylah, and I didn't want to rub it in if I could avoid it.

I laid down my rifle next to the others and began shrugging out of my gear. I'd been running, hunched over for so long, it felt like my spine had a permanent kink in it. I took what seemed like my first full breath in almost 24 hours as I stretched and tried to ignore the ache in my tortured muscles.

"I stayed behind a little to see if they sent another scout into the valley," I explained.

"Did they?" Lexa asked, clearly expecting the answer to be "no."

I shook my head. "I could see the fires where they set up camp for the night, but they didn't send anyone back to the valley."

Lexa nodded, "come daybreak, Ontari will send scouts to search the woods for Pike's men, and to look for an alternate path through the mountains. It is unlikely that she will try the same mountain pass again."

"So, at least another day before she starts marching again?" I summarized.

Lexa nodded, "perhaps slightly more. And none of the remaining mountain passes offer as direct a path to Arkadia."

"Good," I nodded my approval, "that gives us some time to start a ground game against Pike."

"I will lay out some bows and blades," Niylah replied. "For now, we should rest."

I nodded my agreement. "Get some sleep, everyone. We have a busy day tomorrow."

"Wanheda? May I speak with you a moment?" I winced. It wasn't often that Lexa used my title when addressing me directly. She knew I wasn't fond of it, or what I'd done to earn it. The only times she seemed to use it in my presence were when she was introducing me to another party, or when she had something serious she wanted to talk about. I glanced over her shoulder at Niylah and Murphy and gave a short nod to them. They disappeared into the next room to offer us a measure of privacy.

I watched the doorway where they'd disappeared for a moment before I shifted my eyes over to Lexa's. "Heda," I addressed her.

She shook her head, "not anymore. But you are still Wanheda, with all that entails. You are valuable to the Commander. In many ways, more valuable to her than I am."

"We've been over this," I dismissed her comment with a wave of my hand.

"But you clearly didn't listen," she countered. "What if you'd been captured, alone?" She demanded.

"Then I'd be dead," I replied.

"You don't understand, Wanheda," she emphasized my title again. "It is not your death that is the concern: it's who kills you. Your body presented to her is worthless. Your life presented to her is priceless. If you had been captured today, who would have killed you?"

I nodded, defeated. "Probably Ontari. You're right."

"And what would happen if Ontari's army came to believe that Pike held the power of Wanheda?" She pressed.

That, I have to admit, was an angle I hadn't considered. But she was right, again. For a moment I had the image in my mind of Pike standing in full view of Ontari's army, and executing me before their eyes just so they'd know that he'd done it. To be honest, I didn't know if that alone would motivate Ontari's army to lay down their arms, but I had little doubt that Pike would try it if he thought it could.

Sensing my thoughts, she rested her hands on my shoulders and crouched down slightly to look in my eyes. "I don't know how to explain to you how valuable you are to m— to us, Klark. You must live, or you must die at our hand. You cannot die at theirs."

"I don't know how much control we can expect to have over that," I said, conceding her point.

"I do. From here forward, you cannot leave my presence. I swear to you Klark kom skaikru, that you will not be captured alive," her voice took on a serious tone.

From just about anyone else, that would have sounded vaguely threatening. From Lexa, it was probably the closest thing you could expect to a marriage proposal. To be completely honest, I wasn't entirely certain what the appropriate response was. Thank you didn't seem quite right for someone who had literally just promised to kill me, especially when it was a pretty safe bet that she'd have to make good on that promise sooner or later. Finally, I spoke up again, "a few days ago, I almost lost you. Now, you've promised to let me go, if you have to. I know how hard a promise that is for you to make, and I thank you."

Lexa nodded.

"When this fight is over, we owe each other a conversation about the future," I told her. I took a small step backwards. Not far enough to make her hands, still on my shoulders, release me, but enough to create a small space between us. "For now, though, Niylah is right. We should rest."

Lexa let her hands drop to her sides and took a step backwards, mirroring my earlier action. She offered a respectful nod, "sleep well Klark kom Skaikru. I will wake you in the morning."

I mirrored her nod, "sleep well," I answered, "oso gonplei nou ste odon."