No one wanted to stand near the grave. Although four of their own
were already buried in the makeshift cemetery, the rest of the
hundred were still disturbed by the idea of lowering a body into
the ground.
No one wanted to stand with their backs to the trees either. Since
the attack, a creaking branch had become enough to make the anxious
survivors jump. And so, the nearly one hundred people who'd
gathered to say good-bye to Asher stood in a tightly packed
semicircle, their eyes darting between the corpse on the ground and
the shadows in the forest.
The comforting crackle of the fire was conspicuously absent. They'd
run out of firewood last night, and no one had been willing to
venture out for more. Wells would've gone himself, but he'd been
busy digging the grave. No one had volunteered for that job either,
except for a tall, quiet Arcadian boy named Eric.
"Are we sure he's really dead?" Molly whispered, edging back from
the deep hole, as if worried it might swallow her up as well. She
was only thirteen but looked younger. At least, she'd used to.
Wells remembered helping her after the crash, when tears and ash
had streaked her round cheeks. Now the girl's face was thin, almost
gaunt, and there was a cut on her forehead that didn't look like
it'd been properly cleaned.
Wells's eyes flashed involuntarily to Asher's neck, to the ragged
wound where the arrow had pierced his throat. It'd been two days
since Asher died, two days since the mysterious figures
materialized on the ridge, upending everything the Colonists had
ever been told, everything they thought they knew.
They had been sent to Earth as living test subjects, the first
people to set foot on the planet in three hundred years. But they
were mistaken.
Some people had never left.
It had all happened so quickly. Wells hadn't realized anything was
wrong until Asher fell to the ground, gagging as he swiped
desperately at the arrow lodged in his throat. That's when Wells
spun around -- and saw them. Silhouetted against the setting sun,
the strangers looked more like demons than humans. Wells had
blinked, half expecting the figures to vanish. There was no way
they were real.
But hallucinations didn't shoot arrows.
After his calls for help went unheeded, Wells had carried Asher to
the infirmary tent, where they stored the medical supplies they'd
salvaged from the fire. But it was no use. By the time Wells began
frantically digging for bandages, Asher was already gone.
How could there be people on Earth? It was impossible. No one had
survived the Cataclysm. That was incontrovertible, as deeply
ingrained in Wells's mind as the fact that water froze at 0 degrees
Celsius, or that planets revolved around the sun. And yet, he'd
seen them with his own eyes. People who certainly hadn't come down
on the dropship from the Colony. Earthborns.
"He's dead," Wells said to Molly as he rose wearily to his feet
before realizing that most of the group was staring at him. A few
weeks ago, their expressions would've been full of distrust, if not
outright contempt. No one believed that the Chancellor's son had
actually been Confined. It'd been all too easy for Graham to
convince them that Wells had been sent to spy for his father. But
now, they were looking at him expectantly.
In the chaos after the fire, Wells had organized teams to sort
through the remaining supplies and start building permanent
structures. His interest in Earth architecture, once a source of
annoyance to his pragmatic father, had enabled Wells to design the
three wooden cabins that now stood in the center of the clearing.
Wells glanced up at the darkening sky. He'd give anything to have
the Chancellor see the cabins eventually. Not to prove a point --
after seeing his father shot on the launch deck, Wells's resentment
had drained faster than the color from the Chancellor's cheeks. Now
he only wished his father would someday get to call Earth home. The
rest of the Colony was supposed to join them once conditions on
Earth were deemed safe, but twenty-one days had passed without so
much as a glimmer from the sky.
As Wells lowered his eyes back to the ground, his thoughts returned
to the task at hand: saying farewell to the boy they were about to
send to a much darker resting place.
A girl next to him shivered. "Can we move this along?" she said. "I
don't want to stand out here all night."
"Watch your tone," another girl named Kendall snapped, her delicate
lips drawn into a frown. At first, Wells had assumed she was a
fellow Phoenician, but he'd eventually realized that her haughty
stare and clipped cadence were just an impression of the girls
Wells had grown up with. It was a fairly common practice among
young Waldenites and Arcadians, although he'd never met anyone who
did it quite as well as Kendall.
Wells turned his head from side to side, searching for Graham, the
only other Phoenician aside from Wells and Clarke. He didn't
generally like letting Graham take control of the group, but the
other boy had been friends with Asher and was better equipped than
Wells to speak at his funeral. However, his was one of the few
faces missing from the crowd -- aside from Clarke's. She'd set off
right after the fire with Bellamy to search for his sister, leaving
nothing but the memory of the five toxic words she'd hurled at
Wells before she left: You destroy everything you touch.
© 2003-2026