[Dropship — Day 28, 11:40 PM]
The bolts turned with a sound like whispered metal.
Octavia worked the emergency hatch from the outside — a maintenance access panel on the dropship's lower aft section, designed for in-flight repairs and never intended to serve as an escape route. She'd stolen a wrench from Raven's toolkit two hours ago, palming it during the dinner distribution with the sleight of hand of a girl who'd spent sixteen years hiding her entire existence from a government that would have killed her for being born.
Cal sat on the guard platform six meters away, his back to the hatch, watching the camp's main approach. The night guard schedule was his — he'd taken every night shift since Lincoln's capture, building the pattern that would make tonight's shift routine rather than suspicious.
Behind him, metal scraped. A bolt dropped into dirt with a soft thud.
He didn't turn.
The second bolt came loose. Then the third. The hatch panel groaned as Octavia eased it open, and the sound carried just far enough to reach Cal's ears and no further.
Footsteps inside the dropship. Quiet — Lincoln's bare feet on metal decking, moving with the controlled silence of a man trained to cross forest floors without disturbing leaf litter. The rope Cal had loosened during his evening water delivery fell away with a whisper.
Lincoln appeared in the hatch opening. His silhouette was bent — the cuts and bruises restricting his movement — but his eyes caught moonlight and they were clear.
Octavia reached for him. Lincoln took her hand.
They paused. Lincoln's head turned toward Cal — a silhouette on the guard platform, back turned, ostensibly watching the treeline. For three seconds, prisoner and guard existed in the same awareness, and the silence between them carried everything that words would have made dangerous.
Then Lincoln and Octavia vanished into the forest.
Cal counted to sixty. One Mississippi, two Mississippi — the childhood cadence from a life he no longer named, running through his head with mechanical precision. At sixty, he stood, walked to the hatch, and found it hanging open. Ropes on the floor. Bolts scattered.
He drew a breath.
"He's gone! The prisoner escaped!"
His voice carried. Camp erupted — sleeping bodies lurching upright, Bellamy emerging from his tent at a dead sprint, Miller grabbing a weapon and running for the perimeter. Cal stood at the open hatch looking appropriately alarmed, the performance calibrated to sell one specific narrative: incompetence rather than collusion.
Bellamy reached him in forty-five seconds. His face was a mask of fury that Cal could have predicted to the centimeter.
"What happened?"
"I was watching the front approach. Someone opened the maintenance hatch from outside." Cal gestured at the panel. "Bolts removed. Ropes cut. He's been gone — I don't know. Minutes, maybe."
"You were supposed to be watching him."
"I was watching the treeline. The hatch is on the opposite side. I didn't hear—"
"You didn't hear someone removing bolts from a metal panel six meters away?"
Cal held Bellamy's gaze. The lie sat in his throat like swallowed glass — necessary, poisonous, the kind of deception that corroded trust in ways that couldn't be patched.
"I fell asleep," he said.
The words landed like a slap. Bellamy's expression cycled through disbelief, fury, and the specific contempt reserved for people who fail at the one job they volunteered for. Behind him, Clarke arrived — reading the scene in two seconds, her eyes moving from the open hatch to Cal's face with the surgical assessment that never stopped.
"You fell asleep," Bellamy repeated. Flat.
"Yes."
"On guard duty. Watching our only intelligence asset. During a war countdown. You fell asleep."
"Yes."
Bellamy stepped closer. His voice dropped — not for privacy, but because the words were too heavy for volume. "I don't believe you."
"I know."
"If I find out you let him go—"
"Then deal with that when you find it out. Right now we have two days until three hundred warriors hit this camp, and the prisoner is gone. Focus on what's in front of you."
Bellamy stared at him for five more seconds. Then he turned and started shouting orders — search parties, perimeter lockdown, the urgent machinery of damage control. Cal stood at the open hatch and let the camp's judgment settle on his shoulders.
---
The fallout was immediate and thorough.
By morning, the camp had divided into three opinions about Cal Mercer. One third — Bellamy's core — believed he was a traitor who'd freed an enemy prisoner during wartime. One third — Clarke's group — believed he was incompetent, which was worse than treason because incompetent people couldn't be trusted with critical tasks. The final third had no opinion but wanted someone to blame, and Cal was standing where blame could reach.
Wells found him at the water purification system — their system, built together on Day One, still running clean after twenty-eight days. The callback was unintentional and painful. Day One Cal had been a stranger who dug a latrine and earned Wells's respect through labor. Day Twenty-Eight Cal was the man who'd lost their prisoner and might have done it on purpose.
"You didn't fall asleep," Wells said.
Cal checked the filter's charcoal layer. The sediment was building — he'd need to replace it soon, a task that felt absurdly mundane against the backdrop of an approaching army.
"Wells—"
"You don't fall asleep. You haven't fallen asleep on watch once in twenty-eight days. You eat three times what anyone else eats because your body is running on something that burns more fuel than a normal metabolism, and you check the perimeter at dawn every single morning including days when you haven't slept at all." Wells's voice was measured — the diplomatic register, but stripped of diplomacy. "You let him go."
Cal's hands stilled on the filter.
"Why?" Wells asked.
"Because a dead prisoner guarantees no future negotiation. Because Lincoln is the only bridge between us and the Grounders. Because killing him or holding him until Anya attacks would have sealed us into a war with no exit." Cal looked at Wells. "And because Octavia was going to try anyway, and I'd rather it succeeded cleanly than failed messily."
Wells absorbed this. His face moved through the calculation Cal had come to rely on — the political brain, weighing costs, benefits, and the specific currency of trust.
"You could have told me."
"If I'd told you, you'd have been complicit. This way, you're just suspicious."
"That's not better."
"It's safer."
Wells looked at the water filter. The clear water pooling in the catch basin — their first collaborative success, twenty-seven days ago. He picked up a stone and turned it in his hands.
"I trust you less than I did yesterday," Wells said. "But I still trust you more than anyone else in this camp. Don't make me regret that."
He walked away.
Murphy appeared ten minutes later. No preamble. No conversation. He dropped a ration pack in Cal's lap — two bars, the good ones from Raven's pod supplies — and walked past without breaking stride. First time Murphy had given Cal something instead of taking. The gesture was small and enormous simultaneously.
Cal ate both bars and they weren't enough.
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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:
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