Originally published in Jan 2021
Chapter One
Rebirth
Sweet. The air was sweet.
Lou Andersen stepped out of the dropship and took her first real breath of air in seventeen years. Around her, ninety-nine other teenagers streamed out of the dropship with whoops and hollers, following in the footsteps of Octavia Blake. One hundred of them. Sent to Earth to die.
But as Lou looked around—taking in the lush green forest, the scents of loam and wood rot, that sweet, precious air—she realized that this was not death.
This was life.
She sank to her knees, marveling at the feel of grass and dirt beneath her. So different from the cold, stark floors of the Ark. So soft, but so unyielding. She pressed her palms to the ground—the ground—her skin tingling with the foreign sensation of the damp dirt. She picked up a handful and rolled it between her fingers, relishing the texture, the smell. All of it so earthy.
Earth. She was here. On the blue orb she'd seen from space her entire life. On the ground. A place once thought inhabitable. But they were wrong. Everyone on the Ark had been wrong.
A crack of thunder split the sweet air, energizing it, charging it. And then the heavens themselves tore open, unleashing a torrent of rain. Not acidic, not deadly. Cool and crisp, like how she imagined a mountain stream would taste.
The other criminals and delinquents she'd been sent down with screamed and cheered at the storm, and though she didn't open her mouth, her soul howled with them.
Freedom. This is what it was like.
So she tilted her head up to the sky and let herself smile. And with the rain, no one noticed the tears streaming down her face.
It didn't take long for the reality of their situation to sink in.
Once the 100's initial joy and excitement wore off, cheers turned to mutters and questions, smiles into confused frowns. Some of them, at least, were smart enough to start salvaging parts from the dropship to make tents out of the landing parachutes, while others collected kindling for fires.
Lou stayed at the edges of the group, blending into the background. She assessed the dropship, then the surrounding woods, wondering if anyone was thinking about what to do for more permanent shelter, or food and water. Things they would need if they wanted to last longer than a day back on the ground.
A sudden commotion close to the dropship made her look up from her spot on a mossy log. A group consisting of two lean, dark-haired boys, a blonde girl, and another boy whom she recognized as Wells Jaha—the Chancellor's son—faced off against each other, none of them looking happy.
"Relax," Wells was saying to the other two boys. He must've been aware of all the eyes that had turned on him after the scuffle, but he didn't acknowledge it. "We're just trying to figure out where we are."
"We're on the ground," drawled another voice. Lou saw the man from the dropship—the one wearing the guard's uniform and claiming to be Octavia Blake's brother—step toward the Chancellor's son and the others. He looked a lot younger than he had on the dropship; only a few years older than herself, and she was nearly eighteen. He smirked at Wells. "That not good enough for you?"
"We need to find Mount Weather," Wells said. Only a slight twitch of his jaw hinted that he'd read the challenge in the other boy's face. "You heard my father's message. That has to be our first priority."
"Screw your father," Octavia Blake said, stepping up beside her brother. The girl in the floor, they'd called her. A forbidden second child, locked up with the rest of them just for being born. Her blue eyes flashed at Wells before cutting to the blonde girl beside him. "What, you think you're in charge here? You and your little princess?"
"Do you think we care who's in charge?" the blonde fired back. She turned to the rest of the gathered hundred. "We need to get to Mount Weather not because the Chancellor said so, but because the longer we wait, the hungrier we'll get and the harder this'll be." She swept her eyes over them, not backing down despite the scowls and glares she received. "How long do you think we'll last without those supplies? We're looking at a twenty-mile trek. So if we want to get there before dark, we need to leave now."
Lou flicked her eyes to the sky. The storm had only raged for a few minutes before passing over them just as quickly as it had come. It was still early afternoon, the clouds parting just enough to reveal a blue sky beyond.
"I got a better idea," said Octavia's brother, bringing Lou's attention back down to Earth. "You two go; find it for us." He pointed to Wells and the blonde. "Let the privileged do the hard work for a change."
The others let out noises of agreement, but Wells said, "You're not listening. We all need to go."
"Look at this, everybody." One of the dark-haired boys who had confronted Wells earlier sneered at the Chancellor's son and pushed him. "The Chancellor of Earth."
"Think that's funny?" Wells said, taking a step toward the other boy. But he went down, hard, after a vicious kick to his ankle that made something pop, loud enough that even Lou heard it on the opposite side of the clearing.
"No, but that was," the boy said to Wells, his face twisted into an ugly sneer.
"Wells!" the blonde said, lunging for him, but she was held back by one of the dark-haired boy's friends that had come to watch as the crowd jeered.
When Wells got back on his feet, limping slightly, the boy readied to strike again. But before he could, another boy jumped from the top of the dropship, landing between him and Wells with perfect ease. Lou recognized him from the dropship. He was the one everyone called Spacewalker.
"Kid's got one leg," Spacewalker said, jerking his head to Wells's twisted ankle. "How 'bout you wait until it's a fair fight?"
The clearing tensed, everyone holding their breath, while the boy first sized up Spacewalker, then Wells again.
"Hey, Spacewalker!" Octavia Blake strode for the middle ground between Wells and the other boy. She flashed the Spacewalker a wicked grin. "Rescue me next."
There were some chuckles from the bystanders, but the tension diffused. The dark-haired boy grabbed his cronies and stalked off, away from Wells, Octavia, and the Spacewalker, toward Lou's side of the clearing. Octavia and her brother followed not long after, both still looking tense despite the past situation blowing over, speaking in low voices.
Lou watched them all approach from her perch on the log. The dark-haired boy who'd tried to fight Wells looked up and saw her. His pale eyes flashed in recognition just as a sense of familiarity jolted her.
"Well, well, well." He prowled to where Lou was sitting, silent and alone. His friends—or bodyguards, though she supposed they could be one and the same—followed him, realization lighting their faces with nasty grins. Octavia and her brother paused to watch, but Lou ignored them. Her attention was on the boy in front of her. "It's been a while, Killer Queen." He smirked at her new nickname. "I thought they'd floated you already."
She shrugged. "Two more weeks and they would have."
A blessing, really, this voyage to Earth.
She sized up the boy in front of her. Tall, skinny, and edged with mean sharpness. It'd been a few years since she'd seen him last, but she recognized the pale eyes and thin face that bordered on gaunt after time spent in the Sky Box. From a distance, she hadn't noticed him, but this close… "Can't say I've missed you, Murphy."
John Murphy ran his eyes up and down her, no doubt noting the deathly pale skin, the skinny, wasted frame from years of lacking adequate nutrition, and the hollowed, bruised eyes. "And I can't say that four years of solitary treated you well, Andersen."
She knocked absently on the log with her knuckles. "At least I'm out now. Even if we'll probably die in a few days, anyway."
"Andersen." Octavia's brother stared at her, his face hard. "Four years ago. You stabbed a man to death over twenty times."
"Also the daughter of the Ark's Whore," one of Murphy's cronies muttered.
Lou ignored him, meeting the other boy's damning stare. "Not all of us are perfect. That's why we're here, isn't it?"
His face twitched like he was going to say something else, but his sister grabbed his arm, pulling him away from the group. "C'mon, Bellamy. Don't you want to say bye to your little sister before she runs off into the scary woods?"
Her tone held a teasing lilt, but her brother—Bellamy—still smiled at it, allowing himself to be led away toward the group that was gearing up to go to Mount Weather, the blonde girl from earlier and the Spacewalker among the quartet with two other boys Lou didn't know the names of.
Lou looked back to Murphy to see him studying her, intent. Then he offered her a hand as if he'd reached some sort of conclusion.
"Strength in numbers, Andersen," he said to her skeptical look. "Let's go find you a tent."
An alliance. That's what he was offering her.
The Ark was different. She could survive on her own there—she did survive on her own. But this was Earth. Earth was foreign; a long-lost language she had forgotten to speak. That made it deadly.
She took his hand.
He'd done unspeakable things to get on that dropship, but it'd been worth it just to see his sister smile at him again.
Being on Earth after living in a tin can floating through space all his life was just an added bonus.
Even if what he'd told Octavia earlier had been true. That the one-hundred delinquents they'd arrived with were nothing but criminals. And not just petty thieves or teens looking for an adrenaline rush by taking an illegal spacewalk. There were killers among them, too. Murderers.
Bellamy had helped assemble the giant bonfire in the center of the clearing surrounding the dropship. As night fell, the smoke from it poured into the sky, blotting out the stars. One of them was the Ark, but he tried not to think about it. The 100 stood around the bonfire, their laughter and voices echoing around the clearing. A few of them had approached him and Murphy, seeking to remove the wristbands that transmitted their vitals to the Ark.
To give Murphy something to do other than threatening the Chancellor's son and bullying the other kids into giving him and his friends the better debris salvaged from the dropship, Bellamy had assumed a leadership role and directed him to start recruiting the others into taking off their wristbands. He didn't tell them the real reason why he wanted the Ark to think they were all dead, of course. But he could tell what sort of person Murphy was from a mile away, and he'd bought Bellamy's offer of power without batting an eye.
"There we go," Murphy said, yanking off a girl's wristband with a grunt. He held it up, and the group gathered around him cheered.
Bellamy looked on, satisfied, as Murphy threw the wristband into the fire. That was their tenth one of the night. He tried to focus on that, rather than the fact that his sister was currently out in these strange woods alone, with nothing but four other teenagers to protect her.
His gaze landed on the girl beside Murphy, who only stood silently, watching everything around her. He'd hardly believed his ears when Murphy said her name earlier. In the four years since her arrest, she'd faded from the collective memory of the Ark.
But there she was. Louise Andersen. The girl who'd stabbed a man to death, over and over, at the age of fourteen.
He'd heard what Mbege had muttered about her mother being the Ark's Whore. It'd unearthed a long-forgotten memory he had, about a widow named Vanessa Andersen, who'd lived alone in Factory Station with her daughter. The same station he'd grown up in. Even though he'd never had much contact with Vanessa Andersen besides the occasional greeting, he still remembered the beautiful woman and the ugly rumors that had followed her. How she sold her body to the people of the Ark. That she was a seductress; evil, even.
And he still remembered learning that she'd killed herself rather than watch her daughter get floated out into space.
Death touched the girl standing before the fire, who watched Murphy remove another wristband with such haunted, lifeless eyes. An exact replica of that beautiful mother, wasted away into nothing.
She looked up and met his gaze. The fire burning behind her limned her dark hair with gold and smothered her eyes with shadows. Bellamy remembered the stories and the myths his mother had read to him and Octavia when they were younger; before Octavia had been taken away, before Chancellor Jaha had floated his mother. There'd been a story about a goddess of death, primordial and hungry, desperate to satiate her rage and hunger on mankind, with hollow stomach and hollow eyes. She reminded him of that goddess in a way, and it made his insides churn.
For a long time, neither of them looked away, and neither of them backed down from the challenge simmering in the other's gaze.