Murphy woke surprised by the empty bed. Clarke slept a lot. There was no other constant with her. She'd sleep most of the day away if he didn't drag her out of bed. His search yielded nothing but an unconscious Jaha on the couch. He left no dust spec unturned inside the lighthouse, the balcony or the beach. Both mostly destroyed boats were still there, and no new ones. The woods behind the lighthouse were dense and needed shoes to go any farther. He sprinted to get suitable clothes then ran back out as fast as he could go, looking for any sign of her. Murphy shouted her name, and, "You can push me off a cliff and I'd do AS YOU WISH!" Nothing in return.
His panicking stole his breath and made his chest tight and painful. He never wanted her to leave. And if she was having a bad day, she could be in a lot of trouble. If she was having a good day, he'd have zero luck finding her if she didn't want to be found. After miles of searching for any sign of life, Murphy doubled over and threw up stomach acid. She couldn't be gone. He'd never been anything before in his life. He tried, but he always went too far or didn't know what to do. But he knew what to do with Clarke. She'd turned him into a questionably responsible person who finally had someone else to care about that he thought would always be there, always need him. He'd let her in and now she disappeared. And Murphy was lost without her.
He found the big white house where Alie, um, lived, he guessed, and since he hadn't found Clarke anywhere else on this tiny scrap of island, he walked into the jackal's cave. She sat on the floor in the middle of the hallway, with a chessboard in front of her. The hologram he figured had to be that AI nutty thing, told Clarke where to put the next piece for her turn.
"I have checkmate in two," Clarke said as she got up looking bored. "Don't soft serve me. A computer should've been able to beat me in no time."
Alie's expression didn't change. "You tricked me into playing emotionally."
"Then you're a shitty AI."
"There's nothing artificial about me. I am as real as you are."
"But you can't beat a paranoid schizophrenic at chess. I've beat you six times in the last three hours. I started to purposely leave you openings."
"And I thought those were traps. That's the only logical reason to leave yourself open to a devastating attack."
"I somehow doubt I'll get you to stop being a genocidal tyrant by getting you to play tic tac toe over and over, but this show of stupidity does show that there's still a lot for you to learn from us biological illogical types." Clarke spit a bit when she laughed. "Bio-illogical."
"Let's play again." Alie's tone was angry and insistent even while her facade barely changed.
"But I've already told you my secrets. Now you need to learn and apply them to something else. There are only so many games of chess that can be played. It's time to think outside the box or circuitry if you will. It's not like you're getting rusty in your old age, right?" Clarke glanced at Murphy. "I have an admirable bio-illogical person who needs my attention. Come get me when you figure it out."
Clarke took Murphy by the elbow and walked him out of the house. They were inside the lighthouse before she'd let him say anything. "Why'd you do something like that? Clarke you could have been killed!"
"And how many times do I have to tell you that I'm already dead for you to figure out I never stay down?"
He knew he'd spent too much time alone with her when that made sense to him. "You're right. I'm sorry. You're still an adult and can make your own decisions."
"And he gets it!" She sang with her arms raised. "Now he should tell me why he still thinks we can't be together."
Murphy didn't answer the question because as he rolled his head while trying to find a way out of answering, he found a way out of answering. "Where's Jaha?"
"We need to talk about him. He got to Earth by dumb luck in a missile. Alie has the remnants of that missile and is trying to rebuild it. She has some weird inferiority superiority complex because the scientist that gave birth to her for lack of a better term, always treated her like a machine when she's really a person who has been brainwashed into thinking all she is a machine with no thoughts or emotions of her own. And that person has been left largely alone for the last century, with her only contacts being when people bring her bits of metal and technology her droid army uses for her and their upkeep."
Murphy nodded. "So she's a toddler with no real social experience and stunted reasoning? And you made her mad why?"
"She frustrated, not mad. The guy that breathed life into her shunned her when she wasn't perfect and then killed himself when she had what amounted to a global temper tantrum. She's got some abandonment issues if you haven't gotten that part." Clarke chewed the inside of her cheek as she leaned against the pool table.
"Funny. I got it. I can pay attention when it's interesting. So you got her a bit riled to help her figure out she's a real girl?"
"Oh no, she so crazy she'd need a full reboot to get better, but that would kill her. I couldn't get her to tell me where she kept her brain. So all I did was buy us some time for Raven to get here. See. Steel trap." Clarke grinned as she tapped her temple. "A few screws loose but that's OK too."
"Let's fire up the radio." Murphy was glad for the reprieve but it wouldn't last long. He also worried about seeing Raven. How would she react to him, now? He shot her, and she lost use of a leg because of it.
"Ideas about how to get her and Wick across the giant lake without becoming sea monster food would not go amiss right now." Clarke paced behind Murphy as he dug the radio out of the electronics cabinet.
"Or we could let the engineer figure that out. Here we go." Murphy detangled the wires for the radio from the wires of everything else and put the radio on the table.
Clarke plugged it in and looked over the dials. "This doesn't make any sense. The numbers aren't numbers."
Murphy checked the dial settings, and they were numbered just fine. "I'll work the dial, you work the handset."
"Needless to say, urgings by ravens are ignored at one's peril," Clarke said every time Murphy nodded his head that he'd changed the frequency.
It took an hour, but finally someone answered Clarke's strange way of saying hello. "This is Camp Jaha, who is this?"
"I need to speak to Raven Reyes, this is Clarke, who will always pick her first."
"Please stay on the line," the man said.
Murphy raised an eyebrow at her.
"Oh shh you. I've never been a non, or whatever those ladies that married god were called."
"Nun." He stifled a snort.
"Clarke?" Raven sounded like a mom finding her lost toddler.
"Raven!" Clarke smiled then frowned. "There's something I needed, we needed. AI. Dangerous AI, but you make the best booms, so I need you to boom this."
"Clarke? What's wrong?"
Murphy felt his heart clench. He'd hoped Clarke had turned a corner. John gently took the handset from her. "I got this."
She nodded at him, tears welling.
"Raven, this is John. Clarke's not doing very well, but I can tell you what she needed."
"Murphy? You son of a bitch, if you did something to her, I swear I'll make it my mission to end you."
"I didn't do anything. She showed up at my door half dead. I've been nursing her back to health. I don't know what happened, but her mind hasn't been right. But that's not why she wanted to talk to you." John watched Clarke's despondent expression with concern. "There's an artificial intelligence here that we need help with. Clarke said you were the person to talk to. You and a Wick."
"I'm listening."
He explained as much as he could without telling her things that Alie might not like if she overheard. When he told her about the journey, the desert, robbers, minefield, and sea monster, she replied, "No sweat. The cavalry will be there asap."
Murphy set the handset down. Clarke was ripping the seam of her sleeve, so he knelt in front of her and took her hands. "It's all going to be OK."
"All correct, nothing is all correct. No such thing as OK. They spelled it wrong with a wrong abbreviation. But you say OK, and I believe you." She buried her face in his shoulder, and he stroked her hair and back.