Chapter Text
I’m being shuffled and shoved forward until I fall to my knees on a stone floor. My wrists have been tied in front of me with roughly woven rope that scratches with the slightest movement. I was brought back to the tower, but we didn’t take the stairs. I had felt my stomach drop slightly from a change in altitude, so there must be an alternate way to travel between floors of the tower.
Around me, I could sense Ice Nation guards. My ears picked up the swish of their furs, clicking and tapping of their masks and weapons as they moved, and the heavy whoosh of their breathing. There was also a sandpapery noise somewhere in front of me, something rhythmic that would sound consistently for a minute or so, and then stop.
That was as much as I could tell without my sight.
A woman’s voice orders something in Trigedasleng, and the fabric over my head is ripped away. The sudden light burns my eyes, irritating an already throbbing headache.
The smell of rotting blood hits my nose the moment I breathe in. I was kneeling where the Ice Nation woman had slaughtered children- the throne room. My pupils struggle to adjust, and when they do my stomach twists, hard.
The rhythmic, sandpapery noise was the sound of a young woman in tattered, gray clothing scrubbing the floor. Her brush bristles are stained black with the blood of the children that had been slaughtered here. She dunks her scrubber into a bucket of blackened, bubbly water, trying to scourge the blood from the floor.
Her face holds an expression of pure exhaustion. The skin under her eyes is stained purple, lines began to wrinkle her face, though she couldn’t have been much older than me. I knew what she was. I think back to my human history classes on the Ark to find the word.
This woman is a slave.
“Thief!” A familiar voice shouts. The woman I’d seen murder those children strode over to me. Up close, I can see the scarring on her face in greater detail. She bears a diamond shape between her brows, and two lines on each cheek beginning together under each eye and drifting apart as they stretched outward to her mouth and cheekbones.
She still sports her blood-soaked furs, though by now they must have dried for the most part. She stops when she is within reach, towering over me.
Kane had said a name earlier, Ontari. That must be her.
“Where is it?” she spits down at me. Her eyes blaze with rage.
“Where is what?” I ask. Before I can brace myself, my cheek blooms with pain as she strikes me. I lose my balance, tipping over and colliding shoulder-first with the floor. The guard grabs the back of my shirt and rights me.
“I know you took it,” she mutters, leaning down until we are face to face. “Have you searched her?”
My brows furrow before I realize she was talking to the guard. He replies in the affirmative, making Ontari grit her teeth.
“If you tell me what you’re looking for, maybe I can help you,” I offer, trying to be diplomatic. My cheek is still stinging and hot.
“The fleim, you idiot. Where is it?”
“I don’t know anything about a flame-”
Ontari strikes again, backhanding the same cheek, knocking my head to the side. A cry of pain escapes my lips; I quickly clamp my lips together. My breaths come quick.
“You were not with Skaikru when they entered this tower, yet you are one of them. You remained hidden. What for, if not to steal the fleim?” Ontari reaches around, fisting my braid and squeezing tight. My head is forced back.
Up close, I can see the evil in those dark eyes. No pain, no remorse. Looking deep into her eyes strikes fear into my heart. The eyes of a merciless killer. She’d slain children, she’d surely do that or worse to me. There’s something else there. Frantic, biting, afraid. Ontari needed this flame, badly.
“I don’t have anything, I swear.” I try to steel myself, but my voice wavers, betraying how terrified I truly am.
“Lock her up. Bring me the other one,” Ontari orders, releasing my hair with a final jerk. Two guards transport me down to the cell I had broken my people out of just an hour before. As they chuck me in, they drag the unconscious Reese, our missing Arkadian guard, out.
The door of the iron barred cell shuts with a squeal and a thud.
-
Hours later, the guards return.
I’m thrust back onto bruised knees in the throne room. Reese kneels next to me, his face nearly unrecognizable with how badly he’s been beaten. Blood drips steadily from his nose, and his skin has broken apart in several places. The most worrisome injury to Reese is the knife sticking out of his ribs. It’s low enough that it shouldn’t have gotten his heart, but I fear for his lungs.
Reese breathes laboriously, his whole body struggling to pull in oxygen.
“Give up the fleim, or I will do to you what I did to him,” Ontari snarls, grabbing my hair and forcing me to look at Reese. Silent tears stream out of his eyes, wide with fear and pain.
“I told you, I don’t even know what that is. I didn’t take anything!” I cry.
Ontari’s black eyes bore into mine and I brace for another backhand, but it doesn’t come. She says something to the guards in Trigedasleng, and straightens.
A guard grabs my arms, lifting them and sliding a thick, metal hook under the rope tying my hands. There’s a cranking sound, like an old, ungreased gear turning, and my arms get lifted higher.
The hook is attached to a long chain that runs up to the rafters. I cry out in pain when the hook is cranked just enough to lift me off the ground. I stretch my toes as far as they’ll go, but they won’t brush the floor.
The scratchy rope digs deep into my wrists, my whole body weight struggling against the binding. My body sways lightly. I hold on to the hook to try to alleviate the pain in my wrists, and it helps slightly.
At this moment, I realized that this was probably going to be where I died.
Murphy left me. My people had abandoned me. Nobody was coming.
Ontari pulls a small blade from a holster on her ankle, flipping it in her hand over and over as she paces in front of me. Tears begin to form in my eyes.
“Give up the fleim and this can all be over,” Ontari bribes. Her eyes are wild, filled with anger and desperation. Judging by the severity of Reese’s injuries, she’d somehow figured he didn’t have the flame. Ontari needed the flame, but for what? What was its purpose? I wished I could give it to her. Then, this could all be over. I knew that I was only alive right now because of the flame, because Ontari thought I knew where it was.
“Please, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I beg. “Let me go, please.” It’s difficult to draw in a full breath with my arms stretched like this.
Ontari raises her knife, aiming the point at my abdomen. She lifts my hoodie with her other hand. The cold tip of the knife brushes lightly against my skin. Ontari smiles, she’s teasing me. She drags the knife across my stomach in swooping trails, staring deeply into my eyes.
Adding more pressure, she slices across my stomach. I cry out, breaking eye contact by shutting my eyes against the pain. Blood trickles down my abdomen and gets absorbed in the fabric of my pants.
“Tell me where it is,” Ontari orders again.
With all my might, I try to stop the tears from falling. Focus on something else. Not the way the wound is being stretched apart by the weight of my lower body, not the sensation of hot blood cooling once it hits oxygen. Focus on your breathing.
My mind went to Abby, my mentor. The way she’d trained me to keep my head in bad situations. Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth, she’d told me. Forget about what you can’t do, only hold on to what you can do.
I can breathe. I can stay alive. I can give my people more time to get back to Arkadia and mount a defense. I list these things over and over in my head until my lungs stop spasming and the tears stop falling.
In and out. Slow.
The knife digs into the skin of my thigh, forcing through muscle and touching bone. My body jerks involuntarily as I scream, trying and failing to get away from the pain.
“Tell me where it is and I will end this pain,” Ontari sings, teasing. She loves my pain, revels in it.
Focus.
If I continue telling the truth- that I have no idea where her flame is- she would eventually either believe me or figure that I can’t be broken. If I was going to buy more time for my people to prepare to take down the Ice Nation, I would need to play my role.
“I won’t tell you,” I whimpered, barely above a whisper.
It is all I can manage. Knowing that lying to save my people would also mean prolonging the torture made it nearly impossible to force the words out. But I had done it. I had planted the seed. She would never believe my innocence now, no matter what I say.
Ontari works on me for hours. The light streaming in from the windows travels across the floor, fading in its intensity until it’s gone. My voice is hoarse, nearly gone from screaming. Reese lays dead next to me in a pool of blood and urine, having succumbed to his wounds at some point during my torture.
I’d been lowered down moments ago because Ontari had grown bored when I stopped screaming. She was here, somewhere- I could hear the sounds of her eating and drinking. The scent of cooked meat and herbs carries over to my bloodied nose. The cold stone offers some relief to my feverish body- pressing against my temple, my shoulder, my hip.
In front of me are my hands, still bound, the metal hook between them. The skin of my wrists is bloody and cracked, rope fibers stick out from the flesh at all angles.
The tower trembles. A sound like a thunderclap crashes in my ears. A chair scrapes away from a table, clatters to the stone.
“What was that?” Ontari demands. Nobody responds.
Footsteps run to the corner of the room, a voice shouts a command in Trigedasleng. There’s the grinding of the lift that I’d heard on my way up.
Then, silence.
The door to the stairwell opens on the other side of the room, and someone comes rushing in.
“Oh, fuck,” a male voice mutters. “Dayna?”
John Murphy comes into view, kneeling in front of my broken body. He’s got a knife sawing at my bound wrists, his eyes frantically roving over my bloodied face.
“You came back,” I whisper.
“I left my jacket here. Thought I’d break you out while I was at it,” Murphy deadpans. “Can you stand?”
I muster up the strength to nod, his presence renewing my energy just enough to stay upright after he pulls me to my feet.
“C’mon,” Murphy urges. He pulls my arm over his shoulder, his other arm going around my waist. He leads me over to the lift. I expect it to be an empty lift-shaft, because Ontari and her guards took it down, but as we approach, the lift is just arriving back on our level. My head throbs with every step, and wounds that had clotted begin bleeding again. I stumble along, leaning most of my weight on Murphy.
We enter the lift and I move to lean against the wall, trying to relieve Murphy, but he doesn’t release his hold on me.
The lift descends from the top of the tower with a shudder.
“You were right,” I groan, bracing myself from falling forward with a hand on the lift wall. Murphy readjusts his grip on me.
“What are you talking about?”
“You said if I stayed I’d regret it. I do regret it.”
“Hey,” Murphy says, waiting until I open my eyes and turn my head. “I think what you did was brave.” His voice was resigned, as if the words were a difficult truth to accept. After staring into the dark, taunting eyes of Ontari as she tortured me, Murphy’s blue eyes are comforting. The scent of pine is a relief after hours of smelling metallic blood.
My hand grips his shoulder, his tightens on my waist. His gaze travels across my face. I bet I look horrendous, covered in ugly wounds and blood, but I am too tired to care.
The lift stops with a lurch, but Murphy doesn’t let me fall. We step out, greeted by Bellamy Blake.
“Shit,” Bellamy mutters at the sight of me.
“Hello,” I mumble deliriously.
“Get us out of here,” Murphy snaps, already leading me to the tower entrance.
Bellamy props up his gun, taking the lead. Outside of the tower, the city had gone quiet. Darkness had long since fallen over Polis, but through the light of the fires that burned all night long I could see a plume of smoke on the edge of the city.
Flames danced in the trees, and shouts occasionally carried over on the wind.
“What happened?”
“We needed a distraction,” Murphy mutters, half carrying me through the quiet streets.
“So, you started a fire?”
“No, I built a bomb,” Murphy said, like it was obvious.
Bellamy stays ahead of us, gun trained on the street before him. He signals, and Murphy and I duck behind a hut.
“How’d you build a bomb?” I ask after a lone grounder passes by.
“I used the gasoline from the rovers,” Murphy explains. That eliminated taking the rovers back to Arkadia. I’d have to walk. In my condition, I wasn’t sure I’d make it, even with the help of Bellamy and Murphy.
“Guys, less talking, more moving,” Bellamy orders, standing.
We set out again, but I can’t move quickly enough. The blood loss is making me lightheaded and nauseous. I stumble, my eyes closing involuntarily before I can stop them.
“Hey, stay with me,” Murphy says, “We’re almost out.”
I struggle to pick up my feet, but I keep pushing. We make it out of the city, into the surrounding woods.
“Just a little bit farther, okay?” Murphy urges, practically carrying all of my weight at this point. Bellamy hangs back to loop my other arm around his shoulder.
“It’s just through here,” Bellamy mutters to me.
We stop inside a cave. The entrance is small, and well hidden, but there’s no way the grounders don’t know it's here. It can’t be more than a few hundred yards from the edge of Polis.
Bellamy seems to read my mind, and says, “I’ll double back and make some tracks to lead them away from this side of the woods. I should be back in a few hours. The grounders are combing the woods right now. You’ll have to lie low here until they retreat.”
“Thank you, Bellamy,” I say. He nods, taking one last look at Murphy and me.
Bellamy ducks out of the cave and goes to lead the grounder search away from us.
“Are you gonna stay with me?” I ask Murphy, bracing a hand against the cave wall. I don’t know how much longer I can stay conscious, I already feel as if I haven’t slept in weeks. The blood loss is quite literally draining me.
Murphy heaves a sigh before saying, “Got nothing better to do. Why? Would you rather Bellamy stayed instead?”
I shake my head slightly.
Murphy helps me sit against the wall. There’s a small pile of food and water and supplies; they stocked this cave with supplies from the rovers beforehand. Without Murphy’s body against mine, I begin to shiver. The blood that had begun flowing again was now cooling against my skin. That, combined with how much blood I’d already lost, was bringing my body temperature down.
“Here,” Murphy said, handing me a water bottle. I lift a shaking hand to take it. “We got some medical supplies, too. Not much, but… what should I do?” Murphy looks to me with uncertainty.
After a few sips of water, I triage my own wounds.
With little effort, I identify the wound on my stomach as the worst one. I hadn’t seen it, but could feel it bleeding steadily since I’d been rescued.
“Do you have any alcohol?” I ask, setting the water bottle down.
“Yeah,” he responds, snatching a small bottle, about the size of my palm, from the pile.
“Ok, I’ll need that first. Then a bandage that can wrap around my abdomen. I don’t think we have that-”
“Would a shirt work?”
I considered my options. His shirt was by no means sterile. I would probably get an infection from it… but an infection could be cured once we got back to Arkadia. What I wouldn’t survive was much more blood loss.
“It’s better than nothing,” I admit.
Murphy pulls off the short sleeved shirt he’d layered over a long sleeve, tearing it down the front to make a large makeshift bandage. I lift my hands to pull at my hoodie, but can’t keep them steady enough to grab onto the small bit of hem.
“Here, let me.” Murphy comes to kneel in front of me, his knees brushing against the side of my thigh, reminding me of the stab wound there. That would have to be taken care of next.
I watch Murphy’s fingers as he uncaps the alcohol and sets the open bottle down, lining up his supplies in the order I’d dictated to him. He meets my eyes briefly, as if asking permission, before he lifts the hem of my hoodie. Slowly, Murphy reveals my stomach- I see for myself how bad the wound is.
A huge gash runs from the bottom of my ribs on my left all the way to the top of my right hip bone. Ontari hadn’t given enough pressure to tear through the muscle, just severed all the skin. The edges of the wound are puckered. The skin of my stomach glistens, fresh blood painted over dried.
Murphy sits back on his heels, his face pale.
“The alcohol first,” I prompt him, though he already knows. I knew what it felt like to see a bad wound for the first time. To be the person who had to fix it. It was overwhelming. But to Murphy’s credit, he blinks, picks up the bottle and pours alcohol from one side of the wound to the next.
“Augh,” I groan as the alcohol burns through the flesh. “Okay. You’ll need to wrap the shirt around me, tightly. There needs to be enough pressure to stop the bleeding.”
Murphy nods, taking his torn shirt and pressing it to my stomach, wrapping it around behind my back. He leans in to reach behind me, tying a knot. With his face so close to mine, it’s difficult to focus. My eyes are drawn between his eyes and his lips. I must be delirious from the blood loss.
“How’s that?” Murphy asks, his breath fanning across my cheek.
“Good,” I whisper. He pulls my hoodie back down and I clear my throat. “My leg.”
Murphy got to work cleaning and binding the stab wound in my thigh. He’d had to help me pull my pants down to get to the wound, and I could’ve sworn his cheeks darkened just a bit. I didn’t point it out, though I knew that if the roles were reversed, he’d have given me hell.
When the worst of my wounds are bandaged, and the minor ones cleaned with the last of the alcohol, I feel a little bit stronger. Bellamy still hasn’t returned, but he had said it would take a few hours. Murphy sits facing me, in the middle of the cave. His legs stretch out in front of him as he leans back on his hands.
He wags his foot back and forth, slowly- a nervous habit maybe, or just pure boredom- and it brushes against mine over and over.
“Why did you come back for me?” I ask, making his eyes dart to mine. He stops shaking his foot. The cave wall is cold against my back, seeping through my bloodsoaked hoodie. I shiver.
“I told you. Left my jacket.” Murphy watches me closely, judging my reaction. I know that’s not the real reason he came back, he’s just using sarcasm to hide it.
“Is that why you doctored me up, too?” I press.
“Sure,” he says, exhaling. I’m annoying him, I think.
“You care about me,” I state. I don’t even know if it's true, but I can’t come up with anything else. Murphy had been cruel to me before, but weren’t boys just like that? He wasn’t a very noble person, so he wouldn’t have risked his life to get me out unless I mattered in some way to him. Murphy must feel some kind of connection to me. I wanted to know more.
“No, I don’t,” Murphy says. He scoots back, no longer touching my foot with his.
“So, you got me out because of a jacket, you bandaged me up because…” I trail off, waiting for him to finish my sentence for me. I don’t want to push too hard, don’t want to make him snap, but I can’t seem to help myself.
“It wasn’t easy- getting you out. It would be a huge waste of my time if I let you bleed out. It doesn’t mean anything,” Murphy snapped. I try to put the pieces together in my clouded mind.
Murphy hated being called ‘nice’. He was clearly uncomfortable when I hinted that he cared about me. Why the dedication to a bad reputation? What reason could he possibly have to want people to hate him, to think he’s a bad person?
It’s a puzzle I can’t put together. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to prefer being hated. What did it say about me that I couldn’t seem to make myself hate Murphy? He’d hurt me before, but even before he saved me tonight, I’d been drawn to him. He was so confusing. I wanted to break him apart and examine the pieces.
I nod, suddenly too tired to continue. Murphy sighs, the tension he’d allowed to build in himself dissipating.
“Why don’t you rest. It’ll be a while before Bellamy gets back,” Murphy suggests, leaning forward. “I’ll keep watch.”
My eyes are already closing.