Come on, Lily. You can do it.
Her legs were trembling. She could feel it — that low, persistent vibration in her knees she'd been fighting since Clarke had first taken her place beside Finn. She pressed her feet flat against the floor, willing the shaking to stop, and focused on breathing.
In. Out. In. Out.
Just like Bellamy had told her to, that night in the tent.
She pushed the thought away.
"Okay, Clarke," Abby's voice came through the radio, crackling but clear enough to follow. Lily exhaled shakily. "Take a firm grip on the knife. You need to angle it upward and to the left very slightly as it exits the rib cage."
Lily's eyes dropped to Finn's side, to the handle of the blade still buried there, and her mind went blank for one horrible second. She knew where the ribs were. She knew how they sat in the chest. She had studied it.
But standing here, looking at a real person, a real wound, with the storm howling outside and the dropship groaning under the weight of the wind — every diagram she'd ever seen seemed to dissolve.
Stop it, she told herself sharply. Focus, just focus.
"How very slightly?" Clarke asked. Her voice was steady, but Lily could hear the effort behind it.
"Three millimeters." A male voice now, one of the doctors on the Ark. Lily's eyes went wide before she could stop them. "Any more would be bad. Any less too."
"So three millimeters is the only thing we can go for," Lily said, more to herself than to Clarke, but the other girl caught it.
Then Abby spoke again — and the signal broke apart, swallowing her words whole. Lily looked up, searching the faces of Clarke and Raven beside her, and saw the same blank confusion reflected back.
None of them had caught it.
Of course it would drop now, she thought with a flash of frustration. Of all the moments for a storm to interfere.
"Wait, what was that?" Clarke said quickly. "You dropped out."
Raven was already moving, leaning into the radio, adjusting something at the back, her fingers quick and practiced. A moment later, Abby's voice came through again, clearer.
"Three millimeters, Clarke. Got it?"
Clarke nodded, more to herself than anyone. "Yeah, okay. I got it."
Lily watched her. She watched the way Clarke's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly, the way her eyes dropped to Finn's face for just a second before pulling back to the wound. She knew what Clarke was doing — building a wall between what she felt and what she had to do. Lily had seen her do it before, in moments like this.
But this time it would have taken her more effort to do so.
"You can do it, Clarke," Lily said quietly.
Clarke glanced up at her. A brief thing, barely a second — but Lily held her gaze and gave a small, steady nod. Clarke exhaled, and something in her expression settled. Lily understood that she was doing her best to stay focused.
"Steady hand, Clarke," Abby's voice came again, wavering with static. "You've assisted me on trickier procedures than this. Once that knife is out, the hard part is over."
Lily's eyes moved to the suture needle and wire they'd laid out on the cloth beside Finn. Ready. She'd made sure of it herself. Once the blade was out, the wound would start bleeding — fast, probably — and they'd have to close it before he lost too much. She'd watched Clarke's hands during the moonshine sterilization, had noted how steady they were. That helped. A little.
A low rumbling sound rolled through the metal walls of the dropship, making Lily's stomach clench. The storm was getting worse. She could hear it now not just as a distant howl but as something pressing in from all sides — the creak of rivets, the shudder of the floor beneath her boots.
Then Clarke took a breath, square and deliberate, and said, "All right. Extracting now."
"Raven, keep him steady from this side." Lily moved as she spoke, stepping around to Finn's head and positioning her hands carefully behind his neck, cradling it. She could feel the heat of his skin through her palms. Too warm. "I've got his head."
Clarke's hand closed around the knife handle.
The moment she began to pull, Finn's body reacted. A visible tremor moved through him — deep, involuntary — and then his eyes opened.
"He's waking up!" Raven's voice pitched higher.
"Hold him still," Clarke said sharply, not looking up. Her focus had narrowed to a point.
Lily tightened her grip without thinking. "Finn." She kept her voice low and even, the way you spoke to someone you needed to reach without frightening. "Try to hold on."
Clarke leaned closer to him, her voice softer now, stripped of its clinical edge. "I'm gonna get that knife out of you, okay?"
Finn's breathing was labored, uneven — but the ghost of something crossed his face. Even now, even like this.
"Good plan," he managed.
Despite everything, Lily felt her throat tighten. There he was. Still himself.
"Finn." Clarke's voice firmed again. "You can't move. You got it?"
He gave one small nod, his eyes squeezing shut as Clarke resumed the extraction. Lily watched his face — the lines forming at the corners of his eyes, the way his jaw locked — and kept her hands steady around his head, doing the only useful thing she could do right now.
She didn't want to think about what he was feeling. So she didn't. She focused on the pressure of her own hands, on the rhythm of his breathing, on the sound of Clarke working beside her.
The procedure seemed to stretch on forever. Lily was aware of every small sound — the wet give of tissue, Finn's sharp intake of breath with each centimeter — and she kept her expression as neutral as she could, because she knew if she showed fear, it would reach him somehow.
Then the storm hit.
The noise was enormous — a crack like something splitting at the roots — and then the entire dropship shook, violently enough to throw Lily sideways. Her hip connected with the edge of a crate and pain bloomed up her side as she hit the floor. For a second the world was just sound and impact and the taste of something metallic.
When she opened her eyes, she saw it: two thick branches had punched straight through the wall of the dropship, metal peeled back around them like paper.
And Finn was on the floor.
"Finn—" she was already moving, pushing herself upright despite the ache in her hip. Clarke reached him first, dropping to his side.
"Are you alright?"
He had one hand pressed hard against his side, eyes screwed shut, but his fingers found Clarke's arm in the chaos, and when Clarke straightened she was holding the knife — free, clean of him at last — and her expression, despite everything, held the unmistakable shape of relief.
Lily exhaled. "We need to close the slash." She was already moving toward the suture needle. "He could pass out."
Clarke nodded, and together they helped Finn back onto the makeshift table — careful, slow, hands working in a kind of wordless coordination that had built itself over weeks without either of them noticing.
Lily didn't miss the look Raven gave them as they settled Finn into place. She was watching Clarke's hands on Finn's arm, the way Clarke spoke to him in a low voice while she worked, and her expression was something complicated — not quite pain, not quite acceptance. Lily looked away. That was not her space to occupy.
The suturing went more smoothly than she'd feared. Clarke's hands were sure, and Abby's instructions came through clean enough to follow. When the last stitch was tied, Lily stood back and let herself feel, for the first time, the possibility that they had made it through the worst of it.
"You've got anything to cover the wound?" Abby's voice asked from the radio.
"We'll make do," Clarke answered. "Like always." She glanced at Lily, who gave a small nod and slipped away to find something.
The dropship was crowded and dim, bodies pressed against the walls, the storm still roaring outside. Lily moved through the space carefully, scanning the salvaged supplies for anything clean enough to use as a dressing.
"Hey." Jake appeared at her elbow, a roll of cloth already in his hands.
"This any use?"
"Yes." Lily took it from him, running the fabric through her fingers to check the weight. Clean enough. It would do. "Thank you."
Jake didn't move off immediately. He stood there for a moment with his hands in his pockets, looking at her with that slight crease between his brows that she'd noticed before — a look that was less curiosity than something she couldn't quite place.
"Can I ask you something?" he said, his voice low beneath the noise of the storm.
Lily glanced up. "Sure."
"You remind me of someone." He said it simply, without any particular weight, but it landed oddly. "I don't know who. But you do."
Lily held very still for a moment. Not from fear, exactly — more from the strangeness of it. She looked at Jake properly, the way she hadn't taken time to before. He didn't look familiar. She was certain she hadn't seen him on the Ark, not in any of the stations she'd moved through, not in the medical bay, not in the corridors near the Council levels.
"I've never seen you before," she said honestly. "Not on the Ark."
He nodded, like that confirmed something rather than dismissed it. "Probably nothing," he said, with a half-shrug. "Just one of those things."
"Probably," Lily agreed. She offered him a small, tired smile. "Thanks for the bandages."
He nodded again and stepped back, and she turned and made her way back through the crowd to Finn.
He looked paler than before. She noticed it the moment she knelt beside him — the color had drained from his face, leaving it chalky and still. She pressed the back of her fingers to his forehead and felt the heat immediately.
"He's running a fever," she said, looking up at Raven.
Raven shifted beside her. "Abby said he might. She said it could be shock — said to let him rest."
Lily nodded, absorbing that, and turned her attention to the wound. She began to work, unwrapping the cloth, preparing to layer the dressing properly over Clarke's sutures. Her movements were careful and automatic, and for a little while she let herself sink into the familiar rhythm of it — the small, deliberate work of tending a wound that had already been closed.
She didn't notice it at first.
Finn shifted, and she thought nothing of it — just discomfort, just someone unconsciously seeking a less painful position. It happened again, and she still didn't look up. But then the movements came again, faster, and suddenly her hands went still.
She looked at his face.
His whole body was moving now — rhythmic, convulsive tremors starting from his core and spreading outward.
Lily was on her feet before she'd finished the thought.
"Oh my God." Her voice came out quiet. "He's seizing."
"What?" Raven was up immediately.
"Clarke!" Lily called, loud enough to carry above the storm. Her eyes stayed on Finn, watching the tremors, trying to count them, trying to understand their pattern.
Footsteps on the iron ladder. Clarke appeared at the top, took one look at Finn, and crossed to Raven in two strides. "Get my mother on the radio."
"The radio's dead," Raven said. The words came out flat and horrified at once. "Interference from the storm."
Lily was still watching Finn. She didn't look away. Something was wrong — something beyond the stab wound, beyond the blood loss, beyond shock. Her mind was moving fast now, sorting through what she was seeing, building an argument piece by piece.
Clarke and Raven moved to turn him — standard response, protecting the airway, preventing aspiration. Lily watched them work. She watched the froth forming at the corner of Finn's mouth and felt something cold and certain settle in her chest.
She shook her head.
"He poisoned him," she said.
Raven's hands stilled. She turned to look at Lily, and Lily saw the moment the words reached her — the way her face went blank before grief cracked through it, tears cutting tracks down her cheeks before she'd even spoken. "What?"
"Shortness of breath," Lily said, hearing Clarke pick up the thread behind her, "fever, seizing—" Clarke's voice followed hers, low and precise, confirming each symptom as Lily named it.
"That was not just a blade," Lily said. She was looking at the knife now, still lying where Clarke had set it after the extraction. "It's poisoned."
"But you sterilized everything," Raven said, her voice cracking. "I watched you."
"Not everything," Clarke said quietly, her eyes on the knife.
Raven turned to Lily, and the desperation on her face was almost unbearable to look at. "What did he use? How do we save him?"
Lily's eyes grew larger as she turned to Raven.
"I don't know," she said, and the words cost her something. "To find a cure I'd need to identify the compound first. Study it. I have no equipment, no reference materials — and even if I did, synthesizing an antidote from what we have here would take time we don't have."
The silence that followed lasted exactly one second before Clarke broke it.
"Maybe we don't have to." Her voice had changed — it had that quality it got when a thought was forming that was too sharp and too clear to ignore. Lily turned to look at her. "He knows what he used."
The implication settled over the room like the storm outside.
Lily held Clarke's gaze. "You want to ask him."
It wasn't a question. Clarke was already moving for the ladder, the knife in her hand. Lily followed without deliberating, her boots finding the iron rungs on instinct.
When they reached the second level, Octavia was there, and Lily noticed the concern on her face before she'd even spoken.
"Clarke," Octavia said. Her eyes moved between them. "Bellamy's locked the hatch."
Lily looked up at the sealed hatch above them, and the sound of the storm seemed louder here, the metal groaning around them. She thought of Bellamy's eyes from earlier — dark, distant, resolved in a way that had scared her.
She didn't know what was happening on the other side of that door.
But Finn was seizing two floors below, and the radio was dead, and the only person who might know how to save him was locked away with the man who had put the poison in his blood.
Hai ragione, mi scuso. Ho saltato tutta la parte centrale e sono partita dalla fine della scena. Rifaccio tutto dall'inizio, seguendo il tuo schema completo.
Clarke banged on the hatch above them with both fists, the sound ringing through the metal like a hammer.
"Hey!" she shouted, hitting it again, harder. "Open up!"
Lily stood just below her on the ladder, one hand gripping the rung, the other pressed flat against the wall to keep her balance. Beside her on the platform, Octavia had gone very still. Their eyes met briefly — neither of them said anything.
Clarke hit the hatch again.
Then, with a heavy clunk, it swung open.
Lily exhaled. She hadn't realized she'd been holding her breath.
Clarke pulled herself through without waiting, and Lily followed immediately, then heard Octavia's boots on the rungs behind her. The upper level was dim — the storm had swallowed most of the daylight, and the single torch on the wall threw unsteady shadows across everything.
Miller stepped into Clarke's path before she'd taken three steps.
"Clarke—"
"Get out of my way, Miller." Her voice left no room for argument. "Now."
He hesitated a half-second, then stepped aside.
Lily followed Clarke into the room, and then she saw him.
Her hand flew to her mouth before she could stop it.
The Grounder was standing — if you could call it that. His arms were stretched wide, bound to the frame above him, his weight hanging partly from his wrists. His face was a map of cuts, some still bleeding sluggishly, some already darkening to bruise. His shirt was torn at the collar, and there was blood on his chest.
Lily turned toward Bellamy before she could think about it.
He was standing a few feet away, arms crossed, jaw set. And the moment her eyes found his face, he looked away.
She felt the tears come before she understood why. Was this wrong? Was it right? That man had poisoned Finn — had stabbed him and left something in the blade that was killing him right now, two floors below. And yet.
She pressed her fingers harder against her mouth.
Is this what we have to become?
She didn't have an answer. She wasn't sure she wanted one.
"What's on this?" Clarke's voice cut through the room as she held up the blade.
Bellamy moved toward her. "What are you talking about?"
"Finn was poisoned," Lily said. She made herself lower her hand, made herself speak clearly even though her voice felt thin. Her arms crossed over her chest — not defensiveness, just something to hold onto. "There must be something on the blade."
"All this time," Clarke said, and the anger in her voice was the cold kind, the kind that comes after the shock has already passed, "he knew Finn was going to die no matter what we did." She glared at the Grounder, who hadn't moved, hadn't reacted, hadn't done anything at all. "What is it? Is there an antidote?"
"Clarke, he doesn't understand you," Octavia said from behind them.
Lily's mind was already moving. She knew that. She'd been turning the problem over since the moment she'd said the word poisoned — since the foam at Finn's mouth, since the seizing. In the old world, before the Ark, before all of this, people who carried poison also carried a cure. It was practical. It was necessary. If you made a mistake, if the poison touched the wrong skin, you needed to be able to save yourself.
"Did you find anything on him?" she asked, looking between Bellamy and Miller. "Something he was carrying? A case, a pouch — anything?" She paused. "He would bring the antidote with him. He'd have to."
Bellamy moved without a word, crossing to the far side of the room. He came back with a small metal box and opened it. Lily stepped closer.
Six vials sat inside, each a slightly different color — pale yellow, amber, clear, deep green, something brownish-red, and one that was almost colorless with the faintest blue tinge.
"He'd be stupid to carry poison this long without an antidote," Clarke said, setting the blade aside and coming to stand at Lily's other shoulder.
Bellamy looked at Lily. He was close enough that she could see the tension in the lines around his eyes. "Can you tell which one it is?"
She stared at the vials. She turned the problem over — color, viscosity, the slight sediment at the bottom of the green one, the way the clear one caught the light differently from the others. She knew compounds. She knew extractions. She knew what certain plant-based toxins looked like when rendered down.
But this wasn't a lab. There was no spectrometer, no reagent strip, no way to run even the most basic test. Just her eyes and what she knew, and what she knew wasn't enough.
She shook her head. "Not with just my eyes."
"What if we use all of them?" Bellamy said.
"For all we know, the others are more poison." Lily looked up at him. "We could kill him faster."
"Then we ask him," Clarke said, and turned to face the Grounder directly. "Which one?" Her voice came out hard, flat. "Which one is it?"
The Grounder said nothing. His face didn't move. He looked past Clarke as though she weren't there at all, his gaze fixed on some middle distance that had nothing to do with any of them.
"Answer the question!" Bellamy stepped forward.
Still nothing.
Why won't he answer? Lily thought, feeling the helplessness rise in her chest like water. Why is he letting Finn die? What is the point of this?
"We have no time," she said, looking at Bellamy.
"Show us," Octavia said, coming forward. "Please."
"Which one?" Clarke tried again, and this time the desperation was starting to crack through, just at the edges of her voice. "Our friend is dying. You can stop this."
"Please," Lily said to the Grounder directly, even knowing he couldn't understand her. "He's not a bad person. He doesn't deserve to die."
The man's eyes didn't move. His expression didn't change.
Beside her, she felt Bellamy go rigid.
She looked up and saw his jaw clench, saw the shift in his posture — the way his weight moved forward, the way his hands tightened. And then he said:
"I'll get him to talk."
"Bellamy, no." Octavia stepped in front of him.
Lily's mouth opened. She wanted to say something — to argue, to reason, to find the third option that didn't exist. But she thought of Finn's face two floors below, of his chest barely moving, of Raven's voice cracking down the ladder. And she didn't speak.
She hated herself for it.
Then Bellamy's hand closed into a fist, and Octavia grabbed his arm with both hands, trying to hold him back.
"He wants Finn to die," Bellamy said, pulling free. He looked at his sister, then at Clarke. "Why can't you see that?" He turned to Clarke fully. "Do you want him to live or not?"
Lily pressed her hand over her mouth again. Clarke was silent.
Try to be kind, Lily. Her mother's voice, so clear it almost hurt. But what would kindness do here? Would it save him?
"Clarke, you said it yourself," Octavia tried, turning to her. "This is not who we are. He protected me. He saved my life."
"What?" Lily turned to look at her, brow furrowed. They had found Octavia in that cave, chained to a wall. How had she come to that conclusion?
"We are talking about Finn's life," Bellamy said, his voice rising.
The room was still for a moment. Then Clarke said quietly, "Do it."
Lily pushed her hair back with one trembling hand. Octavia kept protesting, but Bellamy was already moving toward the far wall. Lily watched him reach for one of the red dropship belts hanging from a hook — the same kind they'd used during the landing. She saw him pull it free, and before she even understood what she was doing, her legs had carried her to his side.
She placed her hand on his wrist, very lightly.
"Bellamy," she said, barely above a whisper.
He looked down at her hand. Then at her face.
"You don't need to see this," he said. There was no anger in it. Just something exhausted. "Go downstairs."
She shook her head. "I once told you that you're not alone." Her voice broke on the last word. She felt the tears on her face but didn't try to stop them. "I stand by that."
He held her gaze for a moment — something moving behind his eyes, too quick to name — and then he turned away.
Lily didn't follow him. She stayed where she was and looked at the floor.
She heard the sound of the belt being doubled back on itself. She heard Bellamy move to the center of the room. When she finally looked up, the Grounder was there before him, still impassive, still silent, and Clarke had come to stand beside Lily without a word.
Lily looked at Bellamy.
His eyes were too wide. His breathing was wrong — too fast, too shallow. It wasn't just anger. She knew what anger looked like on him by now. This was something else. Fear, maybe. Or the particular misery of someone about to do something they know they'll carry.
You don't want to do this.
She watched his face harden anyway. The way a shutter comes down. And then he swung the belt.
The metal buckle connected with a sound she felt in her teeth.
Lily closed her eyes. She pressed her hands over her ears, and she stood there with her eyes shut and her palms against the sides of her head, and she thought: Marcus would have done this without hesitating. Marcus would never have looked like Bellamy looked before he started.
She didn't know if that made it better or worse.
Bellamy hit him again.
Then Clarke stepped forward, and Lily opened her eyes to see her kneeling on the ground, the vials arranged in a row in front of the Grounder, looking up at him.
"Which one's the antidote?"
The Grounder looked at the vials. Then he looked at Clarke. Then he looked at nothing.
Lily moved closer, standing behind Clarke, and looked at the man's face. She looked for anything — a flicker, a twitch, the smallest involuntary movement toward one of the colors. But he was closed off in a way she had never seen in any person before. It wasn't stubbornness. It was something deeper. A wall built from somewhere she couldn't reach.
Please, she thought. Just tell us. Just let him live.
"Just tell them!" Octavia said, tears running down her face now. "Please!"
Nothing.
Lily pressed the back of her hand against her mouth. Bellamy touched Clarke's shoulder, the lightest contact, and she understood what it meant: there's nothing more here. But Clarke didn't move, and Lily didn't either.
And then Bellamy reached for something on top of one of the crates.
Lily didn't know what it was until he was already holding it — a metal tool of some kind, something salvaged, something with an end that didn't need explaining.
"Bellamy," she said.
"I'm finding another way." He glanced between her and Clarke. "You don't have to watch."
"I'm not leaving without that antidote," Clarke said.
Lily stepped in front of him. "We're going too far."
"He has to talk, Lily." His voice cracked, just slightly, at the edges. Not anger. Something closer to desperation. "Finn will die if we don't."
She looked at him. She wanted to give him a reason to stop — a real one, not just her own horror at what was happening. But she couldn't find the words fast enough, and Bellamy moved past her.
"Last chance," he said to the Grounder.
The man said nothing.
And then Bellamy used the tool, and the sound it made was nothing like the belt, and the Grounder's body shook even though he didn't scream, and Lily said "Oh my God" in a voice she didn't recognize as hers.
Bellamy turned toward her. His face was open in a way she almost couldn't bear to look at — not triumphant, not cold, not anything she'd prepared herself for. Just shaken. Like someone who had just discovered something terrible about themselves and couldn't yet decide what to do with it.
She held his gaze through her tears.
Then Raven came up the ladder.
"What's taking so long?" Her voice was tight and frantic. "He stopped breathing." She held up a hand before Clarke or Lily could move. "He started again. Next time he might not."
The room was very quiet for a moment.
Lily looked at the Grounder. At Bellamy sitting against the wall now, his hands loose between his knees, his eyes not quite focused on anything. At Clarke still kneeling with the vials.
What are we becoming?
"He won't tell us anything," Clarke said to Raven.
Raven's expression shifted. Something calculating and desperate in equal measure. "Wanna bet?"
She moved to the wall without explaining herself, and Lily watched, confused, as she began working at a panel near the base of the frame. When she pulled two cables free, the sparks that jumped between them made Lily flinch back — and then Bellamy was on his feet, stepping instinctively in front of her.
"What are you doing?"
"Showing him something new," Raven said. She brought the cables together again and let the arc of electricity crackle between them, bright and violent in the dimness.
And the Grounder moved. Just slightly — a tightening, a pulling away from the sparks — but it was the first reaction any of them had gotten from him.
He had never seen this before. Lily understood it in an instant. Everything he knew about pain had a shape, a logic. This didn't.
Raven brought the cables to his skin.
The sound the Grounder made — the convulsing, the way his whole body went rigid — made Lily gasp. The lights in the room pulsed and stuttered with each contact.
"Which one is it?" Raven demanded. "Come on!"
He didn't answer. She did it again.
"Oh my God." Lily's voice came out barely above a whisper. "You can kill him, Raven. Stop."
"He's all I have!" Raven screamed — and she wasn't screaming at Lily, and she wasn't screaming at any of them. She was screaming at the Grounder, the words tearing out of her like something she'd been holding back for days. "He's all I have!"
"No more!" Octavia's voice came sharp from behind them.
Everyone turned.
She was holding the poisoned blade.
"He's letting Finn die!" Raven's voice broke.
And then Octavia drew the edge across her own forearm.
"Octavia!" Lily's voice and Bellamy's voice came at the same time. Bellamy surged forward, and Lily grabbed his arm with both hands, pulling him back, because she had already seen what Octavia had seen — the thing none of the rest of them had caught yet.
The Grounder was looking at Octavia. And his face had changed, for the first time he had some kind of reaction.
"He won't let me die," Octavia said, with a certainty in her voice that Lily had no explanation for. Bellamy tried to take her arm and she pulled it back, and then she dropped to her knees in front of the Grounder, blood running down to her wrist. She pointed at the vials, one by one, slowly.
And the Grounder's eyes moved. Just his eyes. Toward the far right of the row.
Octavia pointed to that one, looking at his face, waiting. And then finally he gave a nod. It was small but it was there.
Lily's breath left her in a long, shaking exhale.
Clarke was already taking the vial, already moving. Lily let go of Bellamy's arm and she followed Clarke toward the ladder, then paused and looked back at Octavia, still kneeling.
"Come down as soon as you can," Lily said, before rushing to the ladder. She followed the other girl down, her legs unsteady on the iron rungs, her hands gripping the rail hard.
Behind her, she heard Raven descend as well.
The sounds of the floor above faded as they dropped back into the lower level — the rain, the groaning metal, the voices. Lily's mind was still up there, still in that room, still seeing Bellamy's face in the moment before he'd started hitting. That look hadn't been rage. It had been something worse. Something closer to grief.
She forced herself forward.
Finn was where they'd left him, pale against the makeshift table, his chest rising and falling in shallow, uneven intervals. Lily moved to his side automatically, her fingers pressing lightly to his throat to check his pulse. Weak. Too fast. Irregular in a way that made her stomach drop.
"Do we give it to him as is?" Clarke asked, holding the vial up to the thin light.
Lily shook her head, already thinking. "No." She reached for the small bowl they'd used earlier, still damp with moonshine. She rinsed it quickly with the last of their boiled water. "We dilute it. We don't know the concentration — if it's too strong and we give it undiluted directly into his bloodstream, it could crash his heart." She looked at Clarke. "A proper antidote needs to reach the blood slowly, evenly. Diluted in water, he drinks it — or we get it into him a little at a time if he can't swallow."
Clarke nodded, already pouring a small measure of clean water into the bowl. "How much water?"
"Enough to roughly double the volume," Lily said, watching the vial. It was small — barely two milliliters. "We want to give his body the chance to absorb it without flooding his system."
Clarke carefully tilted the vial, letting the liquid mix into the water. It was pale, almost colorless, with just the faintest tinge of something yellow-green that Lily couldn't identify. She filed it away — something botanical, probably, given what they knew of the Grounders — and pushed the thought aside.
"Finn." Clarke leaned close, her voice dropping. "Finn, can you hear me?"
His eyes moved beneath their lids. Not quite open, not quite awake.
"We need him conscious enough to swallow," Lily said. She picked up a small piece of cloth, folded it, dampened it in the mixture. "If he can't manage it, we can try to introduce it slowly through the inside of his cheek. It'll absorb into the mucous membranes — slower than drinking, but it'll get in."
"Will that be enough?"
"I don't know," Lily said honestly. "But it's what we have."
She moved to Finn's head, sitting beside him, and touched his face with the back of her hand. His skin was burning. She wiped the damp cloth gently along his lower lip, watching for any reflex, any sign of response.
"Come on, Finn," she said quietly.
His mouth moved. Just slightly. An unconscious response to the moisture, maybe — but enough.
"There," Lily said.
Clarke tilted the vial carefully, letting the last of the diluted antidote pass through Finn's lips. He didn't resist. He didn't do much of anything — just lay there, pale and still, his breathing shallow but present.
Lily watched his chest. In. Out. In. Out.
"How do we know if it works?" Raven asked from the other side of the table. Her voice was flat in the way voices got when someone had spent everything they had and had nothing left to color the words with.
"We just have to wait," Lily said. She pushed her hair back from her face with both hands, pressing her fingertips briefly against her temples before letting them fall. There was nothing else they could do now.
"He'll need water when he wakes up," Clarke said. She was looking at Finn with an expression Lily recognized — the one that came after the doing, when the body finally stopped moving and the mind caught up with everything it had been too busy to feel. Clarke looked at Raven. "Do you mind?"
Raven didn't argue. She just turned and went.
Lily stood, understanding without being told. She touched Clarke's shoulder once, lightly, and Clarke didn't speak but her chin dipped slightly — the smallest acknowledgment.
Lily stepped back from the table. "I'll go give Octavia her antidote."
She found a steel cup near the supplies and poured in a careful measure of the warm water they'd kept near Finn, then added the remaining portion of the diluted antidote. She held it steady as she climbed, keeping her eyes on the liquid so it wouldn't spill.
The third level was quieter than she expected.
Octavia was near the far wall, sitting with her back against the metal, her wounded arm resting across her knee. She wasn't looking at anyone. Bellamy was on the opposite side of the room, standing apart from the others — Miller, another boy whose name Lily couldn't place — with his arms at his sides and his gaze on the floor.
When Lily came through the hatch, Bellamy looked up immediately.
"Is it done?"
"I think so," she said, with a small nod. "We can just wait now."
She crossed to Octavia and crouched beside her, holding out the cup. Octavia took it without protest, which told Lily more about her state than anything she could have said. She drank slowly, and Lily stayed with her until she'd finished, then took the cup back and stood.
Her eyes moved to the Grounder.
He was still bound, still in the same position. Someone had done nothing about the wounds — of course they hadn't, there'd been no time — and Lily felt the guilt land on her like a physical weight before she could stop it. She looked at the cuts on his face, the bruising already darkening along his ribs, and she had to look away.
She moved toward the ladder.
"Hey." Bellamy's voice came low, not quite a whisper. "Can we talk for a second?"
Lily glanced around the room. Miller was staring at the wall. The other boy had his head down. Octavia was still, the empty cup held loosely in her hands. No one was paying attention to anything except the particular kind of exhaustion that follows a thing you can't take back.
She looked up at Bellamy. "What is it?" She asked with no harshness.
"That was the only thing we could do," he wasn't being hard with her — she could hear that. His voice had that quality it sometimes got, the one she'd noticed first in the cave during the fog, when the masks came down because he was too tired to hold them up.
"What happened up here — that was beyond us. We didn't have a choice."
She looked at him for a moment without answering. She thought about what she'd heard, and what she hadn't let herself hear, standing with her hands over her ears. She thought about his face before he'd started. The width of his eyes. The shallow breathing. How none of it had looked like someone who wanted to be doing what he was doing.
"I know you didn't want to do it," she said finally.
Something shifted in his expression. Just barely.
"But I wish none of it had ever happened," she finished. "Any of it."
"It will happen again." His voice was even, not defensive. He wasn't trying to convince her of something she didn't already know — he was saying it the way you say a fact that weighs on you. "Things like this. It's going to get worse, Lily. You know it will."
"I know," she said quietly. She'd known it since the first day on the ground. The knowledge had been building in her like water behind a dam, and it wasn't going anywhere.
"Then—"
"I just don't want us to lose ourselves." She said it simply, without accusation, because it wasn't one. It was the only thing she had left that she could say honestly. "That's all."
Bellamy was quiet. She could see him turning it over — not dismissing it, just holding it, the way he sometimes did with things that didn't have easy answers.
She reached out and touched his arm. Just briefly, just the light pressure of her fingers through the fabric of his sleeve — the same gesture she'd made a dozen times in the past weeks.
Then she pulled her hand back, took one last look at his face, and climbed down the ladder.