[Dropship Camp — Day 26, Afternoon]
Bellamy dragged Lincoln through the south gate like a trophy.
Two of Bellamy's fighters flanked the Grounder — Miller on the left, a kid named Drew on the right — and between them Lincoln walked upright despite the rope binding his wrists and the blood tracking down his temple from a gash above his ear. He'd fought. The marks on Bellamy's knuckles and the torn sleeve on Miller's jacket testified to how hard.
Octavia came running thirty seconds later, screaming Bellamy's name with a fury that carried across the entire camp and brought everyone to their feet.
"Let him go! Bellamy — let him GO!"
Bellamy didn't turn. He marched Lincoln up the dropship ramp, through the door, and toward the ladder that led to the upper level. The upper level — where Jasper had nearly died, where the walls were close and the light was bad and the metal floor rang with each footstep like the inside of a drum.
Octavia hit the ramp and Miller blocked her. She swung at him — a wild right that connected with his jaw and snapped his head sideways. Drew grabbed her from behind, pinning her arms.
"Get off me! He hasn't done anything — he's not the enemy—"
"He's a Grounder!" Bellamy appeared in the doorway, breathing hard, his face twisted into something that wasn't anger but looked like it. Fear, Cal thought. The specific fear of a brother who'd discovered his sister had been meeting the enemy in secret, in the forest, at the river, for days. "He's been watching us. He's been mapping our camp. And he's been doing it while meeting my sister behind my back."
"His name is Lincoln, and he's the only one of them who—"
"Inside." Bellamy pointed at the dropship interior. "Or outside the wall. Choose."
Octavia went quiet. Not calm — the kind of quiet that preceded explosion. She looked at Cal, who stood near the water system, watching.
"You knew," she said. Not a question.
Cal held her gaze. She was right. He'd followed her to the river. He'd watched her meet Lincoln. He'd chosen not to expose the contact because Lincoln was the only bridge to Grounder leadership — a bridge that had just burned at the real bridge, twenty-four hours ago.
"I knew," Cal said.
"And you didn't say anything."
"No."
"Why?"
Because Lincoln is the only person on either side who wants peace more than victory. Because exposing your meetings would have severed the one diplomatic thread that survived everything else. Because I watched a show where Lincoln died for trying to be better than his world allowed, and I'm not going to be the person who starts that chain early.
"Because it wasn't my secret to tell," Cal said.
Octavia stared at him. Something shifted in her expression — not trust, exactly, but the recognition that Cal had chosen her side on this, however passively, and that the choice meant something.
"Help him," she said.
Cal looked at the dropship door. Inside, Lincoln was being strung up by rope in the upper level, wrists bound to an overhead pipe, feet barely touching the floor. Bellamy's voice carried down — sharp, commanding, the tone of a man who'd decided that intelligence extraction justified whatever came next.
"I'll try," Cal said.
---
The argument erupted at nightfall.
Five people stood in the dropship's lower level — Cal, Clarke, Wells, Bellamy, and Murphy — while above them Lincoln hung in silence. Octavia sat outside the closed door, her back against the hull, listening through metal.
"He has information," Bellamy said. "How many warriors. When they're attacking. Where they stage. We just lost a negotiation and killed one of theirs — they're coming, and this guy knows when."
"Torture." Clarke said it flat. Not a question. The word sat in the air like a weapon on a table.
"Interrogation."
"You have a knife and a list of questions. That's torture, Bellamy."
"Call it what you want. He knows things that will keep us alive."
Wells stepped forward. The Chancellor's son, raised on diplomatic protocol and legal frameworks that hadn't existed on Earth for a century. "Structured interrogation. Questions, patience, leverage. We offer him something — food, water, the chance to walk out of here. We don't—"
"He won't talk because we ask nicely." Bellamy's voice went hard. "They threw a spear through Jasper. They surrounded us with traps. They put archers in the trees while we tried to negotiate. These people don't respond to nice."
"And torturing a prisoner will make them respond to what, exactly?" Wells's voice stayed level, but the edge was there — the political sharpness he'd inherited from his father, honed rather than dulled by twenty-six days on the ground. "If they find out we tortured one of their warriors, whatever slim chance we have of future negotiation disappears."
"Future negotiation is already gone," Murphy said. First words he'd spoken. He leaned against the far wall, arms crossed, blade visible at his hip. "The bridge burned that. This is war prep, not diplomacy."
Cal listened. The argument cycled — Bellamy pushing for violence, Clarke opposing on principle, Wells advocating for structure, Murphy cutting through to the tactical reality. Each position had merit. None of them addressed the actual problem: Lincoln was the only person in this camp who could connect them to Grounder leadership, and every hour he spent tied to a pipe was an hour his value depreciated.
"I'll take the night shift," Cal said.
Five heads turned.
"Guard duty. Lincoln needs watching. I'll sit with him tonight." Cal looked at Bellamy. "Nobody touches him until morning. Give Clarke and Wells twelve hours to try their way before you try yours."
Bellamy's jaw worked. The calculation was visible — the instinct toward action warring with the political reality that Clarke and Wells had support in the camp, and overriding them without consensus would cost him more authority than he could afford.
"Twelve hours," Bellamy said. "Then we do this my way."
He left. Clarke followed, pulling Wells aside to discuss interrogation strategy. Murphy pushed off the wall and caught Cal's eye on his way out.
"You're not going to ask him questions, are you?"
"Not the kind Bellamy wants."
Murphy studied him. Then shrugged, one shoulder — the gesture Cal had learned to read as I don't understand you but I'm not going to stop you.
---
Midnight. The dropship upper level was dark except for a single lamp Cal had placed on the floor, throwing long shadows across the metal walls. Lincoln hung from the pipe — wrists raw where the rope had bitten during the six hours since capture, blood dried on his temple, his body still despite the discomfort.
Cal sat on the floor three meters away. Cross-legged. No weapon visible — the hull-plate knife was on his belt, concealed under his jacket. He held a water skin.
For twenty minutes, neither of them spoke. The dropship creaked. Below, the camp murmured — muted conversations, the shift change at the gate, Octavia's voice rising once before being quieted.
Cal uncapped the water skin. Poured a measure into a cup. Set the cup on the floor between them, within Lincoln's reach if he strained.
"Water," Cal said.
Lincoln looked at the cup. Then at Cal. His expression was the warrior's mask — flat, controlled, giving nothing. But his eyes were active, assessing the same way Anya's had assessed on the bridge.
Cal took a breath. This was the gamble — the meta-knowledge play that could open a door or slam it shut forever.
"Ai laik Cal kom Skaikru," he said. Slowly. The pronunciation was terrible — fragments assembled from half-remembered television dialogue, the Trigedasleng phrases he'd heard spoken by actors in a recording studio rather than warriors on a battlefield. "Ai gaf... chich op." I want to talk.
Lincoln's body went rigid.
The change was total — from controlled stillness to locked tension, every muscle engaging at once. His eyes fixed on Cal with an intensity that went beyond assessment into something closer to alarm.
"Where did you learn that?" Lincoln asked in English. His voice was hoarse from hours of silence, but the words came fast.
"Not enough of it," Cal said. "Three phrases. Maybe four. My pronunciation is probably an insult to your language."
"It is." Lincoln's jaw loosened a fraction. "But sky people don't speak Trigedasleng. None of them. Ever."
"I'm a quick study."
"No one is that quick." Lincoln studied Cal the way Cal had studied the trap mechanisms on Day Fourteen — the same forensic attention, looking for the component that would explain how this thing worked when every reasonable analysis said it shouldn't. "How long have you been on the ground?"
"Twenty-six days."
"Twenty-six days and you speak my language."
"Three words of your language. Badly. But I'm trying, which is more than anyone else in this camp is doing."
Lincoln looked at the water cup. Then, slowly, he leaned forward and drank. The motion was careful — strain against the ropes, angle the body, lower the mouth to the cup's rim. Cal watched without helping. Helping would be patronizing. Lincoln didn't need assistance; he needed to be treated like a person rather than a specimen.
"Anya will attack," Lincoln said. He set the cup down with his chin. "Three days. Maybe four. She's mobilizing warriors from the outer settlements."
Cal absorbed this. Three to four days. Eighty hours on the outside. The wall was complete now — Murphy's crew had sealed the western gap — but a wall manned by teenagers with sharpened sticks wouldn't hold against trained warriors.
"How many?"
Lincoln was silent for a long time. The lamp flickered. Shadows moved on the walls.
"Three hundred," Lincoln said. "Full complement."
Three hundred warriors against ninety-six teenagers. The math was extinction.
"You're telling me this because you want me to run," Cal said.
"I'm telling you this because you spoke my language." Lincoln's voice was quiet. Steady. The voice of a man who'd made a decision that violated everything his people demanded, the same way sitting on a log and teaching Octavia Trigedasleng violated everything his people demanded. "The girl — Octavia. She's..."
"Safe," Cal said. "Nobody in this camp will hurt her."
"Her brother disagrees."
"Her brother is scared. Scared people do stupid things. But he loves her. That counts for something."
Lincoln was quiet again. His eyes moved to the metal walls, the pipes, the cold geometry of the dropship's interior — a vessel that had fallen from the sky and landed on his people's territory, carrying a hundred strangers into a world that had been killing outsiders for a century.
"You're not like the others," Lincoln said.
"People keep telling me that."
"It's not a compliment. Different is dangerous. My people kill different."
"So do mine."
The silence stretched. Below, Octavia's voice rose again — she was arguing with someone about access, demanding to see Lincoln, being refused. The sound carried through the floor like a heartbeat.
Cal refilled the water cup and set it between them.
"Three days," Cal said. "That's not enough time to stop a war. But it might be enough time to give Anya a reason to pause."
"What reason?"
"That's what I'm going to figure out." Cal stood. His legs ached from the cross-legged position, and the caloric deficit sent a wave of lightheadedness that he rode through with one hand on the wall. "I'll be back tomorrow night. Same arrangement. No knife. No questions about troop positions."
"You already asked about troop positions."
"And you answered. Which tells me you want this to end differently too."
Cal climbed down the ladder, leaving Lincoln in the dark with water and the echoing voice of a girl who loved him through a metal wall.
In the lower level, Octavia sat with her back against the hull. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry.
"Did he talk to you?" she whispered.
"A little."
"Is he okay?"
Cal looked at her — seventeen, fierce, the girl who'd spent her life under a floor and was now fighting for the freedom of a man her own people would call enemy. The first Grounder-human relationship in ninety-seven years, built on stolen hours at a river, and Bellamy was going to try to destroy it in the morning with a knife and a list of questions.
"He's strong," Cal said. "But we have three days before his people come for him. I need you to trust me. Can you do that?"
Octavia held his gaze. The assessment lasted two seconds — everything she'd observed about Cal since landing, the latrine and the wall and the fog warning and the fact that he'd known about Lincoln and kept her secret.
"Three days," she said.
Above them, Lincoln shifted against his ropes. Below, the camp slept behind walls that wouldn't be enough. And in between, Bellamy was sharpening a blade and making a list.
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Author's Note / Promotion:
Your Reviews and Power Stones are the best way to show support. They help me know what you're enjoying and bring in new readers!
You don't have to. Get instant access to more content by supporting me on Patreon. I have three options so you can pick how far ahead you want to be:
🪙 Silver Tier ($6): Read 10 chapters ahead of the public site.
👑 Gold Tier ($9): Get 15-20 chapters ahead of the public site.
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Your support helps me write more .
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