'All The Children'

"Is he going to be okay?" Marlow asked with concern. Will was lying on a makeshift bed in a makeshift medical tent, wearing a makeshift bandage around his shoulder.

"It isn't going to kill him, if that's what you mean. Unless it gets infected of course, which is very likely in this environment," Flo answered. The Pyro had designated her as the unofficial medic for the camp, after he discovered she was the only one with any modicum of medical training. She was a pleasant girl, congenial and very sociable. Marlow only knew her from the bizarre circumstances surrounding her arrest, but after seeing her work on Will's wound with next to no necessary supplies, she had developed a healthy respect for the other girl.

"I'm just hoping he stays asleep, because boy, is that going to sting when he comes around," Flo continued, starting to gather her equipment.

Marlow looked over Will with sympathy. His eyelids fluttered every now and then, and the dark curls of his hair were stuck to his head with sweat. She had held him down while Flo pulled the arrow from his chest, and at that moment she was glad Alfie had had the foresight to take Sascha away. Will had screamed so loud she thought they might have been able to hear him back up there on the Ark.

"You don't have any painkillers?"

Flo shook her head, holding out her empty hands in demonstration. "We lost the medicine chest in the descent. I told Jareth about it but he said it's not exactly a 'priority'." Flo rolled her eyes. "I suppose it will stay that way until either he or his lackeys end up hurting themselves."

Flo was right. The Pyro was not likely to be roused to action by Will's injuries, of all people's. He would be similarly unmoved if she was the one hurt, or Alfie, or even little Sascha. That thought didn't sit right with her. She hoped they might have left the idea of a privileged upper class behind on the Ark. After being subject to such a system for all of their lives, why would they even entertain emulating it down here?

"I'll find it," Marlow announced suddenly. "The medicine chest, I mean."

Flo looked hopeful for a moment – an expression that was quickly replaced by a sceptical raised eyebrow. "You're going into the forest? With the friendly neighbourhood natives running around and firing welcome gifts at you?" She waved the broken, blood-stained arrow to illustrate her point.

"I'm not afraid of the Grounders ," Marlow said, raising her chin to make it look as though she believed the lie.

"Oh, Grounders? Is that what we're calling them?" Flo grinned as she continued to clean her workspace.

"It's a word I've heard thrown around. I like it better than some of the more… colourful names I've heard, anyway."

The flap of the tent parted, and another girl entered, dark hair strewn every which way.

"Yeah, best keep your spicy language to yourself," Flo said devilishly. "My sister here has delicate ears."

The girl looked like a carbon copy of Flo, from the heart shape of her face to the very specific shade of her eyes. The only real difference was the embarrassed flush to her ochre cheeks. "Flo, you promised…" she muttered, putting a ration pack into her sister's hands.

If having a sibling was a strange occurrence on the Ark, having a twin was stranger still. Marlow had never seen the two of them together before, and it was like looking side-on through a mirror. Aggie was a complete reflection of Flo, and Marlow could see just how easy it would have been to pull off the bait and switch manoeuvre they had been practising for so many years. But, watching them closely enough, the differences started to appear. Like the way Flo tore into her ration pack like a starving animal, while Aggie carefully dissected the wrappers and nibbled delicately at the food inside.

"This is Marlow," Flo said, through a mouth full of food. "You know, Driftwood, because her parents…"

"Flo!" Aggie exclaimed, obviously aghast. "You can't say things like that, it's…" She sighed, as though deciding it wasn't worth the effort. She continued on in an even tone, looking anywhere but at Marlow. "I've… well, I've heard about you before but I don't think we've ever, um…"

"Spoken?" Marlow finished as Aggie trailed off sorrowfully. "No, we haven't. But I answer to Driftwood too, so don't worry about it." She'd learned some years ago that it was hopeless to try and fight the nickname. It was stuck to her the same way as her shadow was stuck to her heels, and it was either embrace it or hide from it in the darkness forever. She couldn't do that – she loved the light too much. "So are you a medic too?"

Aggie looked down at her oil-stained clothes apologetically. "I'm… I'm a mechanic, actually."

"The best on the Ark! Well, before she was locked up anyway," Flo said enthusiastically, nudging her twin with a spiny elbow.

"Not quite that good," Aggie shrugged, but there was a hint of a proud smile on her face. "I was only an apprentice."

"A mechanic, huh?" Marlow was impressed. She loved to tinker with whatever objects she could get her hands on, but it was very rare that she actually knew what she was doing. She was very much a 'poke a stick in it and see' kind of worker. To have an actual, trained skill in something so useful… well, she half-wished she'd had the opportunity to learn while the option was there. "Oh," she realised suddenly, rolling up her sleeve to show her arm to Aggie. "Does that mean you know what these are?"

Aggie barely gave the wristband a fleeting glance. "They're tracking devices. My guess is that they're transmitting our vital signs back to the Ark. As long as they can see that we're living and breathing down here, they'll assume it's safe to follow us."

"Why wouldn't they have just set up a communications device?" Marlow frowned with confusion. "Wouldn't that have been simpler?"

"But they did," Aggie said, her eyes wide as she finally met Marlow's gaze. She suddenly seemed far more comfortable now that she was talking about machines and not real, live people. "There was a two-way radio built into the dropship, but it was fried during the landing. It's useless now."

Marlow thought for a moment. "Do you think you can fix it?"

The question seemed to catch Aggie off guard. "I mean, I could. If I had the right parts, but they'd be hard to find amongst the scrap…" She stopped short, and shook her head vigorously. "No, Jareth told me I had to make weapons a priority. I need to figure out how to make some kind of explosive or something…"

The thought of The Pyro with explosives was a bitter one. She doubted his need for such a thing was entirely rooted in a concern for the camp's protection. "Forget what Jareth said," Marlow told her. "That radio is a priority. And if he has a problem with that, you can send him my way."

Flo was wiping crumbs from her hands when she asked, "Why bother? The Ark doesn't want us, and we don't need them. Let them think we're dead. We can start our new lives here."

"I think the Ark is dying," Aggie said, and her quiet words were like an atom bomb.

A thick silence fell around them. Marlow was the first to broach it. "What do you mean?"

Aggie was studying her cracked fingernails intensely, looking for all the world like she wished she hadn't said anything. "I found… I found some numbers while I was working in engineering. They seemed to suggest that life support for the Ark was failing, and fast. I showed them to the chief engineer and he took them off my hands, but next time I asked him about them, he told me the equipment was faulty, that the readings it had given off were incorrect." She looked up, eyes watery. "I maintained that machine myself, each and every day for a year. I don't believe it could have been so inaccurate."

"Who was the chief engineer?" Marlow asked, alarm bells ringing in her head.

"Luther Conway."

"The council," Marlow grimaced. "They've been hiding this from all of us. That's why, after all these years. That's why we're here on Earth. We're their last hope." The weight of realisation settled on her shoulders. And yet she felt a sudden sense of pride rush through her, unbidden. She, nothing more than a scrap of Driftwood left behind by her criminal parents – she had a purpose in all of this. The community that had tarnished her reputation with the same judging brush as they had used with her mother and father, that very same community needed her. This should have been her chance to get even. This should have been the time for her to strike back at the Ark, for all those wilting glances in the hallways, for all those vicious names whispered behind her back when she was no more than a child. These were the same people who had murdered her parents before she was old enough to even know them, who had robbed her of a life she had no way to fathom. They had told her, again and again, that she would never amount to anything, through nothing more than the quality of the blood that coursed red and hot through her veins. Every single person down there on the ground had a reason to turn their back on the Ark, and her most of all.

But something stopped her. The council could damn well float themselves for all she cared, but did the children really deserve such a cruel and terrible fate? A long, dark suffocation, all because she had abandoned them? There were kids like her still trapped up there in the sky, the very walls around them a ticking time bomb. And when oxygen got scarce, of course it would be the children without parents to mourn them that were tossed aside first. There was an orphanage of babies who had never known their fathers, never been sung to by their mothers, and who would never take a breath past their first birthday unless she, Marlow Cohen, stepped up to do something. Not for herself, and not for the council, but for them. The lost and the small, the damaged and the broken – her own people.

She couldn't form those thoughts into any coherent sentence, so she said instead, "Flo, there are children on board that space station. Families. I'm sure you have people you love up there too, right? We need to let them know that Earth is safe."

"But is it?" Aggie murmured, casting a look at the unconscious Will. His wound was slowly staining the cloth that served as a bandage. "What about whoever it was that put an arrow through Will?"

"Leave the Grounders to me," Marlow said, standing tall. "Aggie, please focus all your energy on getting that radio to work again. If you need anything at all – and I mean anything – come and find me. Hopefully I'll be back with the medicine chest soon."

"Here." As she tried to leave, Aggie thrust a sealed ration pack between her fingers. "Thank you, Marlow. You're a good person."

Marlow tried to thank her, but the mechanic insisted on looking anywhere but at her. She slid the silvery packet into her back pocket, and stepped outside.

It was disgustingly humid. Everything about the world felt wet, and the sun was struggling to shine through the heavy clouds that shadowed the sky. Without its position as a guide, it was hard to know what time it was, but there were others setting up the fire pit as though it was dusk. She could tell they were destined to fail. It was too wet to light anything. She thought about going over to tell them, but she realised with a sudden lull how exhausted she was. She had been up all through the night, helping Flo with Will's wounds, but she felt too wired to sleep. Her brain was abuzz with thoughts and plans, and she knew in a heartbeat that she had to find Alfie.

She circuited the camp, hoping to find him, but she was quickly distracted by the uproar of a crowd somewhere nearby. She cocked her head to listen and she heard a few violent obscenities being thrown around beneath the tumult. Following the noise, she drew up alongside a group hidden in the corner of the camp. They looked like they were fighting, or maybe even celebrating. She was quickly learning that there was a fine line between the two circumstances. Deciding they were just being boys, she turned to walk away.

There was a sudden clutch at her wrist. "And where do you think you're going, blondie?"

One of the boys had her. She sighed with exasperation, turning to face him with a choice string of words ready to leap from her lips.

That was when she saw the knife. Her curses fell short, replaced instead by a desperate cry for help.