The medical tent was quieter after they took Murphy away, but the quiet had a different quality than peace. Lily stood in the middle of it with the damp cloth still on the floor where she throw it and the bowl of red water on the table beside her, and she listened to the sounds of the camp settling back into its evening rhythms — the fire, the voices, the ordinary sounds that had no idea what had just happened — and she felt the anger sitting in her chest like something with edges.
She was not going to stand here.
She turned and started gathering what she needed; the clean cloths, the tincture of thyme, the fever infusion she had prepared two days ago. She packed them into her bag with hands that moved faster than they needed to, and she told herself she was not shaking, and she was mostly right.
He was taken by Grounders. They did that to him. She had said it to Connor and he had looked at her like it didn't change anything, like the fact of what had been done to Murphy was simply irrelevant to the question of whether he deserved to be tied to a ladder on the floor of the dropship with a fever and nobody checking on him through the night.
She picked up her bag and walked out.
The majority of people in camp had went to bed, like they usually did, but she could see that people were still busy at the dropship. She didn't have to wander to guess what was the reason behind it. But she kept walking and crossed the clearing toward the entrance.
Connor was standing outside it and he saw her coming from ten yards away. She watched his expression close the more steps she made.
"Not again," he said, stepping into her path.
She stopped in front of him with her bag in her hands and her jaw set. "I had not finished with him," she said. "I need to see those wounds."
"I told you." He insisted, "He'll survive."
"You don't know that." She kept her voice level with effort. "He has a fever. He needs his wounds monitored. He needs—"
"He needs to be where we can watch him." Connor did not move. "That's what he needs."
Lily stared at him. She thought about the last two days — about the Exodus ship burning somewhere in the forest, about Clarke trying to run toward it while Bellamy held her back, about lying awake in the tent watching the canvas go from black to grey. She thought about Murphy's face when he had recognized her, that involuntary release she had seen in him when he understood he was not still alone. She thought about his hands.
"What the hell is wrong with you, Connor?" The words came out full and she did not apologize for them. "Let me through."
"As I said." He crossed his arms. "He can survive."
She felt the anger rise past the point where she had been managing it. "You don't get it," she said. "He was taken by Grounders. They did that to him." She watched his face and saw nothing change. How could he not feel even a little bit of compassion. Of course Murphy was not the best of people, but they had wrongly accused him, attacked him, almost hanged him, and then they had left him to die, and he almost did. How could no one feel anything for that?
"He's one of ours, Connor." She kept saying. "We have to help him."
He took a step towards her, but Lily didn't backed away as he did so. "You're not in charge of this camp, Lily."
Her jaw set as she blinked, "Oh, but you are?"
They stared at each other across the short distance, Connor's jaw working, the sound of the camp going on behind her as if none of this was happening.
Then from inside the dropship came a sound — Murphy, audible even through the metal walls, a groan that had real pain in it, the kind that wasn't manageable.
Lily moved before Connor could say anything, shoving past him with both hands, hard enough to get through, and ignored the protest behind her and pushed through the entrance into the dropship.
The inside was not empty, she realized. She had expected Connor and Eric and perhaps a couple of other guys. But what she found was a dozen people — fifteen, maybe more — standing around the edges, all watching Murphy as if he was in any condition to attack them.
Murphy was on the floor near the base of the iron ladder, his wrists bound to the lowest rung with rope that had not been tied carefully. He was on his side, his body curled slightly inward, trembling in the way she had been watching for all evening. She could see the wounds she had been cleaning, the cuts and bruises she had been trying to address, looking worse against the shadows. And nobody was doing anything.
She stood in the entrance for one full second, looking at the room, looking at the people in it, and felt something in her chest go very tight and very still.
Then she moved toward him.
The crowd parted, because she was walking through it with a directness that left no room for interpretation. She crossed the floor and got down on her knees beside Murphy as soon as she reached him.
"Hey." She kept her voice even, trying to sound calm to not startle. "How are you feeling?"
His eyes found her. She watched the recognition travel through him, and then she watched his shoulders shift — just slightly, just enough. "Could be better," he said, "in all honesty." His voice was still thick, still working harder than it should have been. But he seemed conscious enough. Then her eyes moved to the rope, and the way it was tight against his wrists.
"Alright," she said, reaching for the knife at her belt. "I'll finish tending your wounds. Just... just try not to fall asleep." She opened the blade.
But Connor's hand closed around her wrist, stopping her from moving. "What the hell are you doing?"
She turned and looked at him with an angry glare, bothered by the way other people were looking at her. "I need to tend to his wounds. I'm not leaving him tied up on the ground like an animal." She pulled her arm free. "Let go."
Then a voice from outside made them turn.
"Where is he?"
Bellamy's voice came just before the flap of the tent moved, and then he was through the entrance and moving through the crowd, Clarke behind him and Finn behind her, and the crowd parted faster for him than it had for Lily. His eyes found her immediately — she saw them do it, the quick scan of the room that stopped on her face first, then moved to Murphy.
She watched his expression change.
She had learned to read Bellamy's face in the past months and she knew the look that came before he made a decision he had already committed to. She saw it now, settling over his features like a door closing, and she felt her stomach drop.
"Bellamy." His name came out before she had finished deciding to say it.
He had not looked at her again. His eyes were on Murphy.
"Everyone but Connor and Eric," he said, and his voice was the voice he used when he was not asking. "Out. Now."
The room began to empty around her — the spectators filing toward the entrance, shuffling past Bellamy and Clarke and Finn without making eye contact. Lily did not move. She felt Bellamy's gaze find her again, and she read in it what it was asking, and she shook her head.
"I'm not leaving."
He looked at her hard and she looked back. Lily had nothing to apologize for and he could see that she knew it, and the hardness in his gaze did not move her.
"What happened to him?" he said finally. Not at her. He just wanted someone to answer, and she did.
"He was taken by the Grounders," Lily expalined. "They did this to him."
"We caught him trying to sneak back into camp," Connor added, making Lily glare in his direction.
"I wasn't sneaking." Murphy's voice, flat and tired and not quite strong enough but present. "Lily found me while I was running from the Grounders."
Bellamy turned to her, his eyes sharp. "You brought him here?"
She looked at him and then she looked at Murphy on the floor and then back at Bellamy and she could not quite believe they were having this conversation. "I couldn't leave him outside."
"Why?" Bellamy's word came out hard. "Did you see any Grounders?"
Lily frowned, "What—no, but—"
"Did anyone see Grounders?" He turned to Connor, who shook his head as he glared at Murphy.
"Uh-uh." It was all he said.
Bellamy nodded once. The kind of nod that was a conclusion rather than an agreement. He turned back to Murphy and raised the rifle.
Lily moved.
She was still on her knees when she shifted — forward and sideways at once, putting herself between the rifle and Murphy, her arm out. She heard Murphy make a sound behind her. She looked up at Bellamy down the line of the weapon and she said, "Are you out of your mind? Put that rifle down!"
But Bellamy kept his position, as his jaw tightened, "Move, Lily." That was all he had to say. He was pointing a gun to a wounded boy and herself and that was all he had to say?
Her gaze hardened as she looked at him, "No."
"Move—"
"What the hell is wrong with you?" Finn stepped forward and pushed the barrel of the rifle down with both hands, putting himself beside Lily. She felt the air change in the room — Bellamy's eyes going to Finn with that particular cold quality, the calculation happening behind them.
"We knew what would happen if he returned." Bellamy's voice was controlled, which was worse than if it hadn't been. And then he looked back at Lily, that was not about to give up.
"Do you think he's lying?" She kept her eyes on Bellamy's face and tried to find the thing she knew was in there — the thing that had breathed with her in the dark, that had held her face in careful hands. "Bell, look at him. He couldn't have done this to himself." He didn't answer just observed her.
"And if he was with the Grounders," Finn added, "then he knows things that can help us."
"Help us?" The word had a bitter quality in Bellamy's voice. "We hanged him. We banished him. And now we're gonna kill him." He looked between her and Finn, and then he raised the rifle again. "Get the hell out of my way. Both of you."
Lily's jaw set not moving an inch. "No."
She held his gaze as he looked at her and for some moments the room was very quiet. Lily knew he would not have shoot her, at least of this she could be sure. It was Clarke that broke the silence.
"They're right." She said and Lily turned to see her crouching beside Murphy, her fingers moving over his wounds with the practiced assessment Lily recognized.
"Like hell they are!" Bellamy argued, "Clarke, think about Charlotte."
Clarke looked up at Bellamy. "What happened to Charlotte was as much our fault as his." She pressed her fingers carefully to the skin around one of the deeper cuts, and her expression confirmed what Lily already knew. "He's not lying. His fingernails were torn off."
The silence that followed was the kind that had weight.
"They tortured him, Bell." Lily said it quietly. She watched his face for the thing she had seen pass through it in other moments — the places where his certainty cracked around the edges — and she thought she saw something, for just a second, in the particular stillness that came over him at her words.
"You and the Grounders should compare notes," Finn said.
Lily closed her eyes briefly. "Finn—"
But Bellamy had already closed back up, the moment gone, his expression hardening in the way it did when something had gotten too close and he was putting distance between himself and it. "The Grounders know we're at war," he said and then he turned to Murphy like he had already made a decision and was not interested in revisiting it. "What did you tell them about us?"
Murphy was quiet for a moment. Lily turned to look at him — the trembling in his limbs, the effort it cost him to simply stay upright, the way his lips pressed together before he answered. When he spoke, his voice was flat.
"Everything."
Lily closed her eyes. She heard the word land in the room and felt the weight of it, the practical danger of it, and she understood why Bellamy's jaw was set and why Clarke's expression had gone careful and calculating. She understood all of it. She could not bring herself to blame Murphy for a single syllable of it.
Clarke stood. She crossed to Bellamy with that purposeful walk she had when she was managing something. "Once he's better, find out what he knows, then he's out of here." Lily heard her say directly to Bellamy and before she could stop herself, she got up to get closer to the two.
"What?" She looked between Clarke and Bellamy. "Clarke, after what's happened to him — you want to send him off on his own again?"
"He's leaving, Lily. Like we decided." Bellamy was the one who spoke, and from his tone she knew that he didn't want any argument about it.
But Lily did not back away, "That was before we knew the Grounders would actually—" She stopped as she observed the both of them, they truly had no seconf thought about it?
"You can't do this." She insited, "You can't just—"
"I'm sorry, Lily," Clarke said, her tone kind but firm. "He can't stay." And then she moved towards the exit of the dropship.
"And if he refuses to leave?" Bellamy said to Clarke, making her stop on her tracks and turn to them. "What do we do then?"
Clarke's answer was quiet and final and Lily felt it land somewhere in her chest like a stone. "Then we kill him." She walked toward the entrance without looking back.
Lily stared at the space Clarke had just occupied. She turned to Bellamy and looked at him for a long moment — at the set of his jaw, at the rifle, at the particular quality of his stillness — and she spoke, very quietly, "Careful not to enjoy it too much."
She moved back toward Murphy.
"Hey." Bellamy's hand closed around her arm. She turned. His face was close and his eyes were doing several things at once. "I need to talk to you."
"You might be eager to see him dead," she said, "but I'm not." She pulled her arm free with a steadiness she had to concentrate to maintain. "Once I'm done with Murphy, I'll come find you. Alright?"
She heard the sound he made — somewhere between a scoff and a breath — and then she heard his footsteps toward the exit, and then he was gone.
She waited until she was sure he wasn't coming back. Then she knelt beside Murphy and reached for the rope with her knife.
Her hands were not entirely steady. She noticed this and said nothing about it. She sawed through the rope with the particular focus of someone who needed to be doing something specific, and when the last of it fell away she heard Murphy let out a long breath that he had probably been holding for a while.
She reached into her bag.
"Why are you helping me?" His voice was barely above a whisper.
She felt her lips move — not quite a smile, not quite anything. She thought about what she wanted to say. She thought about Murphy at the dropship entrance, the way he had said her name twice while Connor and Eric were taking him out. She thought about what she had said to him in the forest three months ago when she gave him a strip of cloth and told him she was sorry.
"We should never have left you alone. No one should be alone," she admitted without trying to cover her saddness. Then she reached for his face with the cloth soaked in thyme. "Now relax. Let me clean your wounds."
She worked in silence, retracing the ground she had covered earlier in better light, checking for the things she had not been able to fully assess. The firelight was worse than the lamp in the medical tent. She adjusted.
"Have you become a doctor while I was gone?" he said, after a while.
The breath that came out of her was almost a laugh. "Something like that. Clarke's way more skilled than I am. I'm sticking to the basics." She moved to his hands and paused, frowning at the damage that the earlier cleaning had not fully addressed. "How long—" She stopped. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't ask."
He was quiet for a moment. "Three days," he said. "They tortured me for three days."
"I'm so sorry." She said it, meaning every word.
He turned his head and looked at her with an expression she had seen on him before and never quite known what to do with. "Why?"
"What do you mean, why?" She frowned up at him.
"You should hate me." His voice was flat as he looked at her. "Like all of them. What are you trying to prove?" She observed him in silence for a moment before moving so that she could look at him better.
"What are you trying to prove?" she asked. But there was no harshness her voice. She was genuinely interested to know that.
He made a sound — pain, or something adjacent to it — and looked away. "Nobody does anything for nothing."
She was quiet for a moment. She thought about Bellamy saying the same thing to her once, under different circumstances, with that same flat certainty. The Ark had done that. The Ark had taken children and taught them that care had conditions and generosity was a transaction and you always, always looked for the cost before you accepted anything.
"My mother was a teacher," she said as she took his hand to clean his fingers. He turned to look at her with a little frown as she spoke. "She always believed that kindness was the most important thing. Kindness, compassion. That was what she taught me."
"And yet you're a criminal." He said not keeping his eyes away from her.
"I stole medicine for a person I deeply cared about." She watched something move across his face as she said it — a small involuntary thing, a tightening, and she filed it away without pressing on it. So she continued.
"I don't do things because I need something in return, Murphy. I just believe in some things, and I try to stick to them as much as possible." She met his eyes. "Even when it's difficult. Even when the people around me make it very difficult."
He looked at her for a long moment. His eyes were bright in the torchlight — she told herself it was the fever, the exhaustion, the particular quality of what he had been through. She did not press on that either.
"Did you save them?" Murphy asked after a moment, making her look at him. "The person you stole the medicines for." Lily felt her eyes fill with tears thinking about Grace. The lump in her throat got tight everytime she though of her. And the only thing she could do was shake her head.
"You should lay down," It was the last thing she said to him that night. But she did not leave.
She had told herself she would check on him every hour. She had not managed to leave for more than twenty minutes at a stretch. The dropship floor was not comfortable and the light was bad and she was running on the particular wired exhaustion of too many consecutive difficult days, but she stayed because the fever had not broken and because every time she got up to go, she thought about what the night would be like if she left and came back in the morning to find it had gotten worse while nobody was watching.
Clarke did not come.
Bellamy did not come.
She had known that this was likely. She was still angry about it. She had spent the better part of the night moving between low-grade anger and a bone-deep tiredness that made the anger difficult to sustain, and what she was left with, somewhere around the third hour, was something quieter and more complicated. She thought about Murphy and about what three days of torture must have meant. She really didn't want to think what it must have been like. She thought about the Grounders' violence, which she had seen in other contexts, and tried not to follow that thought to its end.
Murphy woke suddenly around when the sun had already came up.
She heard him before she saw him — the sharp intake of breath, the scrambling quality of someone coming out of a bad place too fast — and she was up and across the space before she had finished deciding to move.
"Hey, hey." She got her hands on his shoulders, careful, not restraining. She really didn't want to scare him. "It's alright. You're alright."
He was fighting it for a moment — the disorientation, the impulse to move before he knew where he was — and she held steady and kept talking until she felt the tension begin to ease, slowly, the way it did.
His eyes focused on her face.
She saw him find himself, locate the present, put together where he was. She watched the transition from wherever the dream had been to here, and she kept her expression even and her voice calm, and after a moment she felt his breathing begin to slow.
"You've still got fever," she said.
"Yeah, well." His voice was rough with sleep and pain and the aftermath of whatever had woken him. "Lucky enough I feel like shit. I didn't even notice."
"That's comforting," she said.
He looked at her for a moment, she was about to ask him why he was looking at her like that, when suddenly he bent forward and vomited.
She moved without thinking — getting her hand to his back, helping him turn so he could breathe, keeping him from going forward into it — and when she saw it her chest went cold.
Blood.
"Oh my God, your lungs could be compromise. I'll get Clarke." She said just before she started to rise. But then his hand caught hers, making her look at him.
"Wait." Barely audible as he took deep breaths. He turned his head to look at her. His eyes were clearer than they had been all night, which struck her as strange and not entirely reassuring. "Thank you."
She felt her expression do something she didn't fully control. She thought about all the versions of this she had not said, all the ways she had been trying to say it since she found him in the undergrowth outside the wall with his face a map of what the Grounders had done. "Lie down on your side," she said. "I'll call Clarke."
And she went out into the camp.
The people were already moving and going on with their usual activities and duties for the day. She looked around for Clarke and did not immediately find her, and she was crossing toward the tents when she heard Bellamy's voice.
"Can you talk now?" She could hear the wish he had to provoke her, exactly like he used to do when they met. But she had no time for that.
Lily let out a breath and kept walking. "Not now, I need to find Clarke."
His hand suddenly closed around her ar,m making her turn.
"What the hell are you thinking?" He looked like he had not slept, which she could have told him before she left the previous night. His eyes were tired, but she could see the anger in them. But she did not let this make her back away.
"I'm just trying to help him." She said firmly.
"Why?" He asked seeming genuinely confused, and almost betraied as he looked at her. "You know what he did."
Lily's jaw clached at that, "I know what we did as well." She still remembered the mod, the way they had attacked Murphy, how they had hanged him and then they had left him alone in the woods to die. They were not better than him.
"He brought this on himself." He said in an angry hiss.
She shook her head slowly. "Not enough to deserve this." He made a sound in between frustrated and dismissive and looked away with a humorless chuckle.
"You know what I think about all of this." She waited until he looked back at her. "I never wanted Charlotte to die. But I also didn't want Murphy left alone in the woods. And I was right! He was tortured, Bell!"
"Stop trying to save everyone, Lily!" He said raising his voice, enough for some people to turn to them.
"I can't believe you right now." She said it quietly, which she knew was worse than if she had said it loudly. His eyes widened as she saw them glisten under the sun.
"What would you have me do?" He spread his hands. "Let him back in and trust him? Wait for him to riot again?"
"I'm not talking about trust." She said with a shake of her head, her eyes never leaving his face. "I'm talking about the fact that we are a community, Bell. We shouldn't—"
She saw his eyes widen suddenly. "What's that?" His voice changed. His hands came up — careful, the way they always were around the bruises, around the places where she might be tender — and he turned her face gently toward the light. "Lily. There's blood."
She frowned. "What?"
Her fingers went to her cheek. She pulled them away and looked at them — the smear across her fingers, dark and wrong. Murphy had vomited blood. What if it was not the lungs? What if it was something else.
She touched her face again, getting her fingers dirty with more blood.
"Oh my God." She stepped back from Bellamy, gently pushing his chest so that she could get free from his touch. "You have to stay back."
Bellamy's eyes widened at her request. "What? No—"
But before she could say anything, she saw Connor start to caugh just a few feet from them. She could see blood coming out of his mouth. And then another, her eyes widened when she recognized Eric. And then she heard someone vomiting.
Jake... she though as soon as she saw him.
The three of them, Lily herself, they were all people that had something in common. And when she heard the flap of another tent move and saw Clarke walking out with blood stains on her cheeks that was just the confermation.
"Oh my God," she whispered, "Murphy..."
Then her and Clarke looked at each other across the clearing. From her expression Lily could tell that the girl had come to her same conclusion.
They moved toward the dropship at the same time.
"Lily!" Bellamy called her, but she turned her head without stopping.
"Stay here, Bell." Her voice came out shakey as she looked at him. "Please, just stay here."
She did not wait to see if he listened as she entered the dropship.
Inside Murphy was where she had left him, on his side as she had told him, but he had moved — struggling upright or trying to, his arms shaking with the effort. He was vomiting blood again when they came through the entrance, and Lily was beside him before Clarke had finished crossing the floor.
"Murphy." Clarke's voice was softer than Lily had heard her use with him before. She crouched in front of him and waited until he had finished, until his breathing had settled slightly, until his eyes came up to her face. "Look at me." He did. "I need you to tell me how you escaped from the Grounders."
He was quiet for a moment. His breathing was labored, the blood still at the corner of his mouth, his hands pressed flat against the floor as though testing its reality. Then he spoke.
"I don't know." He looked between Clarke and Lily. "I woke up and they forgot to lock my cage. There was no one there." He paused, breathing. "So I took off."
Lily closed her eyes.
She heard the silence that followed. They were both trying to process what that all meant.
Clarke said it instead, barely audible. "They let you go."
They looked at each other over Murphy's head. Lily thought about the bridge — the Grounder commander with her skull-masked riders, the arrows from the tree line, Jasper firing first. She thought about what followed. She thought about every hand that had touched Murphy in the past three days, every hour he had spent in the Grounder camp.
"They don't use just poison," Lily said as she looked at Clarke.
She recognized the footsteps coming from outside immediately.
Bellamy, she thought.
And then he was through the entrance, his eyes going immediately to her, wide in a way she did not often see.
"Bell, you have to get out of here." Lily said as soon as she saw him.
"What the hell is going on?" He stepped forward and she watched him take in the scene — Murphy, Clarke, the blood, the quality of the light on all of it — and she watched his expression do several things in rapid succession before settling into something focused and afraid.
Clarke turned to him, but she didn't got up. "Biological warfare," she explained, and Bellamy moved his eyes towards Lily.
The words sat in the dim space of the dropship, and outside the camp went on with its morning sounds, and Lily looked at Bellamy's face as he took in what Clarke had said — the widening of his eyes, the slow shift of his gaze from Clarke to Lily, the fear that she saw there clearly because she knew how to read it now. He looked at her the way he looked at her when something had gone beyond what he had prepared for, when the thing he was facing was bigger than his ability to put himself between it and the people he was trying to protect.
Clarke's voice was steady and quiet and final. "You waited for the Grounders to retaliate for the bridge?" Bellamy said nothing, he just nodded. "This is it." She looked at Murphy, then at Lily, then back at the door where the morning light was coming in. "Murphy's the weapon."