She had been staring at the same jar for ten minutes.
Lily was sitting at the small worktable in the medical tent, a cloth folded in her lap, and her hands weren't doing anything with it.
The camp sounds drifted in from outside. Voices, the knock of wood against wood, someone laughing somewhere near the wall. Ordinary sounds. She should have been out there — Jasper had mentioned berries, Monty had mentioned more than they'd thought, the rations were getting thin. There was work to do.
She pressed her fingers lightly to her lips, remebering the feeling of the kiss.
He kissed me, she told herself, still not sure it really happened.
She moved her hands to the cloth instead, spreading it flat against the table, smoothing out a crease that didn't need smoothing. It had been — she counted back — not even two hours since he had walked out of this tent. Less than two hours, and she had reorganized the jars twice and ground bark she didn't need and wiped down a surface that was already clean. Her mind refused to stay where she put it.
I do trust you, he had said to her.
She let out a breath and picked up the cloth again, turning toward the row of small metal boxes where she kept the vials — the prepared tinctures, the things she'd labeled carefully and kept sealed. She reached for the nearest one to check the inventory, and stopped.
The latch was open.
She frowned. She never left the latches open. She was very careful about it. With a frown she lifted the lid.
The vials inside were arranged in their usual rows, small and stoppered, catching the light. She counted them quickly, then counted again.
Ten missing.
She sat back, the box in her hands, and looked at the empty spaces. They weren't scattered — the vials were gone from the front rows, the ones most accessible if you were reaching in quickly, if you were in a hurry. If you didn't want to be seen.
Who would take ten vials? And of this particular preparation — the antiseptic tincture, yes, but also the stronger infusions, the things she kept for emergencies. Whoever it was had taken a range.
But who'd do it? No one had left the camp but Bellamy and Clarke. Who else would take them and keep them for themselves. She looked out and she noticed Raven walking back to the tent she shared with Finn. Maybe it was her, Lily thought. Maybe Finn had been in need of something to ease the pain. Maybe Clarke had given them to her. But why didn't she tell Lily?
Probably she just forgot, she guessed. Clarke had been very busy lately.
She closed the latch, pressed it shut, and set the box back in its row.
But she looked at the empty space in the row for a moment longer than she needed to.
The tent flap moved, and she turned too quickly. It was Jake. She made herself relax. He was standing in the entrance with his hands in his jacket pockets — he had that slight looseness to his posture she'd noticed in people at the end of a long day, though it was still morning. His expression was easy, pleasant even.
"Sorry to bother you," he said, before observing her face. "You okay?"
"I'm fine." She put a small smile in it. "What do you need?"
"Miller said you might come with me." He shifted his weight slightly, glancing back over his shoulder at the camp. "Jasper and Monty found a good patch of berries outside the east side. More than we thought, apparently — enough to actually help with the rations if we can get them all in." He looked back at her. "I don't know plants and I need someone who does, so I don't bring back a bucket of something that'll put twenty people in the ground. What do you say?"
Lily thought about it for a moment. She had been meaning to go out — had been telling herself for an hour that she should move, that sitting still in this tent thinking about Bellamy was doing nobody any good. And he was right: it wasn't as simple as picking the red ones and leaving the rest. She looked at the open latch of the box again. Then she pulled her bag toward her and began to pack it. "Give me a moment."
She added her knife to her belt, a folded strip of clean cloth, the small leather pouch with the dried identification samples she carried when she foraged. Jake waited in the entrance, patient, watching her move around the tent with that same easy expression. There was nothing strange about him. There was nothing strange about this. She tied the bag shut. "Ready."
They left through the east gap in the wall, where two of Bellamy's patrol stood with spears. One of them gave Jake a nod. She noticed that — the familiarity of it — and noted it and let it pass. The forest here was different from the sections she knew best. The undergrowth was denser, the light filtering differently through the canopy. Her boots found the ground with the particular attention she always paid outside the wall — each step measured, eyes moving between the path ahead and the middle distance, scanning. Jake walked beside her, slightly behind, hands still in his pockets.
"How long have you been doing this?" he asked. His voice was conversational, unhurried.
"What?" she asked turning to him with a little frown.
"Medicine." He said, "You know... your plant stuff."
"I worked as a medical technician on the Ark." She held a low branch aside and let it go carefully. "Mostly synthetic compounds and far more advanced machines."
"Mm." He was quiet for a moment. She heard his boots on the soft earth, his breathing unhurried. "You are Lily Hale, right?"
At the question she felt her body freeze, she never liked when someone brought up her life in the Ark. She didn't answer, but he seemed to take it for an affrimation.
"I've heard you've changed station." Jake kept saying, his voice was calm and pleasant, but she didn't like to talk about that.
"Yes, six years ago," she answered forcing a smile.
Jake nodded in silence for a moment, before he spoke again. "Is it true that Marcus Kane set that up for you? The moving? And job?"
She kept her eyes on the ground ahead. "Why do you want to know?" she found herself asking and Jake let out a chuckle.
"Just wanted to know if he really had been that generous," he said, but Lily didn't feel relaxed buy his laugh.
"He is not a generous man," she said carefully. "He does things for reasons."
"Yeah," Jake said. Something in the flatness of the word made her look at him — just briefly, just a glance. His expression was still easy. "People like that always do."
They walked in silence for a few minutes. The trees thickened. She could see the patch Jasper must have meant — a low, shaded stretch where the undergrowth thinned and the soil was darker, good for berry growth. She oriented herself by the position of the sun and the shape of the hill to the northeast. She knew how to get back from here. That knowledge steadied her. She crouched beside the first bush and began to look. The berries she remembered were here — dark, fat, clustered close to the main stems. She reached for one and pressed it gently between her fingers to check the texture.
"These are safe," she said. "The ones with the matte skin. You see how the surface isn't shiny?"
Jake crouched beside her, looking where she pointed. "Right."
"The glossy ones, smaller, slightly more red in the center — don't touch those. They grow in the same conditions." She moved along the bush, scanning. "And there's a vine that sometimes grows through these — thin, pale green stems. If you see it, leave the whole section alone."
"Got it." He began to pick from the bush she had cleared, his movements slow and methodical.
She moved further along, working in silence. The light had shifted — the morning was burning off, the shadows shortening. She concentrated on the task, her hands moving from bush to bush, her mind genuinely engaged for the first time since she'd sat down at that table. This was what she knew. This was the work she could do without second-guessing. She didn't notice it immediately — it came in pieces. The way Jake had stopped picking without saying anything. The sound of his boots on the ground, closer than they had been. The slight change in the quality of the silence around them — not the usual forest quiet, but something with intention in it.
She straightened slowly and turned.
He was standing a few feet behind her. Not in a path position. Not at the angle of someone moving toward the bush she'd just cleared. His hands were out of his pockets now.
"Jake?" she said.
His expression had changed. The easiness was still there — the particular kind of ease that had no relaxation in it, that was held deliberately, like a door held shut from the inside. His eyes were different. She had noticed them before — that quality of contained feeling — and now she understood what it had been containing.
"How well do you know Kane?" he said.
Her spine went very still. "Why are you asking?" She did her best to keep her voice even.
"He wanted to talk to you specifically." Jake took a step forward. It was not fast, but somehow Lily felt the need to take a step back. "Out of all the hundred."
"I told you." She said, trying to keep her voice from shake. "He knew me on the Ark."
"Right." His head tilted very slightly. "He helped you. Gave you a job. Made sure you were taken care of." Another step. "That's what you said."
"Jake." She didn't move back. She measured the distance between them, the angle to the nearest tree, the way the undergrowth lay between her and the gap she'd used to come in. "What are you doing?"
"My mother worked in environmental," he said, conversationally, still that same easy tone. "My father was in maintenance. You know what those people have in common?" She said nothing. "The Council doesn't care about them. They work the jobs that keep the Ark running and they follow the rules and they do everything right. And when the Council decides to cut oxygen because the numbers don't add up, because one is too sick, do you know who fills those numbers?" His voice was still level, still almost pleasant. The worst part was how almost pleasant it was. "I watched them. I was sixteen. I watched them take my mother away, and years after she was floated I found my father hanged. And the people who made that decision — the people on the Council — they're still up there. Still running things. Still untouched." His eyes moved over her face. "And then you."
He moved before she could finish his name.
There was no warning beyond the one she had already ignored — the shift in his weight, the slight tilt of his body — and then his hands were on her, both of them, seizing her by the front of her jacket and throwing her backward with a force that knocked the air from her lungs when she hit the ground. The impact drove through her shoulders and the back of her skull, not hard enough to black out but hard enough that the world went white at the edges for a second, her vision stuttering. She tried to push herself up and he was already over her, his knees coming down on either side of her hips, his weight pinning her before she could find her footing.
She opened her mouth and he pressed one forearm across her throat — not crushing, not yet, but enough that her next breath came in wrong, shallow and catching.
"Kane asked for you," he said in her face. The pressure on her throat increased slightly. Lily's hands found his arm and pulled, her fingers scrabbling for purchase, her heels pushing uselessly against the ground. "That makes you pretty important for him."
"I'm not—" She forced the words out through the pressure on her airway. "I'm not what you think I am to him—"
"It doesn't matter what you are," Jake said. "It matters what it would do to him to know you're gone."
He had planned this, had walked her out here with purpose, had waited for the right moment in the right section of forest, and she had followed him because she had looked at him and seen sadness and exhaustion and the ordinary grief of the hundred. She had looked at him and not seen this.
She stopped pulling at his arm and she moved her fingers on his face, using her nails enough to make him cry in pain. His head snapped back and the pressure on her throat released for the fraction of a second she needed — she twisted hard to the side, bucking her hips, and got one leg free and then the other, scrambling to her feet before he had recovered his balance.
She ran.
The undergrowth was thicker here than it had looked from the path and it tore at her — branches across her face and arms, something catching at her ankle that made her stumble without falling, the ground uneven and treacherous in the low afternoon light. She could hear him behind her, his footsteps faster than she expected, and she pushed harder, her lungs burning, her throat aching where his arm had been.
She almost made it.
She came around the wide base of a beech tree and the root caught her — a thick, raised thing half-buried in the leaf litter, completely invisible — and she went down hard, her hands barely catching her before her face hit the ground. The impact drove through her palms and up her wrists and she heard herself make a sound she didn't recognize, something involuntary and animal, and then he was on her again.
He grabbed her by the hair this time, a fistful of it, hauling her up and spinning her around, and before she could find her feet he slammed her back against the trunk of the beech with enough force that her vision went white again, properly this time, the bark raking across her cheekbone and temple as she hit. The pain was immediate and specific — a burning line from her cheekbone down toward her jaw, the particular heat of broken skin — and she felt the warmth of blood starting before she'd fully registered what had happened.
He pressed her there, his forearm against her collarbone now, his face close to hers.
"I don't want to do this," he said, and the terrible thing was that she believed him. "I spent weeks telling me it was not you. But then he called your name." His jaw tightened. "And I have to do it. I have to. So he will finally understand what he makes us go through." His eyes were bright and too wide. His pupils wide and black.
"You understand? It's not you. It's what he'd feel. That's all I have left to take from him."
Lily looked at him. The blood was reaching her jaw now, warm and slow. Her palms were scraped raw from the fall. Her throat hurt. She looked at Jake's face — at the grief behind the calm, at the boy who had been sixteen when they took his mother, who had found his father after — and she thought clearly, with the part of her mind that stayed cold when everything else was afraid: I am not dying here. I am not dying in this forest for Marcus Kane.
She brought her knee up.
He twisted just enough that she caught his thigh instead of what she'd aimed for, but the impact loosened his hold and she shoved — both hands, every bit of her weight — and got free, spinning away from the tree. This time she didn't run straight. She went sideways, cutting between two close-standing trees where his broader shoulders would slow him, and she heard him curse behind her as he had to turn his body to follow. She bought herself five seconds, maybe six, and she used them to scan the ground.
The stone was half-buried near the roots of the nearest tree — not large, but the right size, solid, with a good edge. She bent without stopping moving and grabbed it and kept going another three steps before she turned.
He was coming fast. His expression had finally broken from that terrible calm into something rawer, and he was not calculating anymore — just moving toward her, and that was what she needed.
She waited until he was close enough that she didn't have to throw it.
When he reached for her, she stepped to the side the way she had not done the first time, and she swung the stone with both hands, putting her whole weight behind it, the way you would if you never wanted to have to do it again.
The sound it made was dull and solid and wrong.
Jake dropped.
He went down in sections — first his knees, then sideways, his hands going out to break the fall and not quite managing it. He was not still. She could see him moving, his hands working against the leaf litter, a low sound coming from him that she didn't let herself listen to. He was not getting up. Not yet.
She dropped the stone.
Her hands were shaking. Her face was bleeding, she could feel it on her jaw now and on her neck, and her palms were scraped nearly raw and there was something wrong with the wrist she'd landed on — not broken, she made herself assess, not broken but deeply unhappy, sending a specific sharp complaint up her forearm when she moved it. She pressed it against her body without thinking.
She did not look at Jake again. She turned toward the light coming through the canopy in the direction that meant east, and she ran.
The wall appeared in the amber evening light, and Miller was the first person she saw.
He turned from where he was standing near the inner side of the wall and stopped moving entirely.
"Lily, where were—" He took one step toward her and stopped. "Hey."
"Miller," she called.
"What happened?" He crossed to her quickly, his hand on her arm, steadying. "Are you alright?"
"I'm alright." Her voice came out more even than she expected. "I'm alright."
"What is it?" Miller asked in panic as he started to scan the dark woods, "Was it a Grounder?"
Lily looked up at him, and she wanted to tell him what Jake had tried todo to her, but then she thought at the boy he was and what he had to endure because of the Ark, because of her father.
"No," she said. "No — I fell. And I dragged Jake down with me. The terrain was worse than I thought past the berry patch, he went down a slope." She looked at Miller. "We have to bring him back. I don't know how bad it is. He hit his head."
Miller's expression tightened into focus. "Okay. Where exactly?"
"East, past the patch — maybe a quarter mile from the wall, at the base of the big ridge." She had counted her steps coming back. She had made herself count. "I can show you."
"Not like that." He looked at her wrist. "What's—"
"It's fine. I can show you."
Miller let out a groan of frustration, "With everything that is going on!"
Lily looked at him with a frown, "Why? What's going on?"
"People are behaving strangely," he said showing the people in the glade. They were indeed acting wierd. It was like they were drunk. Real drunk. They would laugh, and fall, and yell.
Lily eyes moved to the berries, that many of them were still eating. She put the pain of her head aside for a moment just to walk to where they were keeping the berries. And she realized what was happening as soon as she got one in her hand.
"God..." she muttered, looking up at Miller that had followed her. "Are these the berries Monty and Jasper found."
"Yes, they brought them here this morning." Miller explained, and Lily let out a breath.
"Stop eating it, we can't... we can't eat those," she said, and Miller looked at her with a frown. "They're mildly opiate."
His eyes grew larger as he looked around, "Are you serious?"
"I wish I wasn't," she said touching her forehead, still feeling the blood. "We have to go take Jake, Miller." She said moving to take one of the torches. "It's too dangerous out there."
They found him where she'd said — sitting against the base of the ridge, his hand pressed to the side of his head where the blood had dried to a dark line above his ear. He looked up when they came through the undergrowth, and his eyes found her face. He held it for one moment. Then he looked away.
She looked at him for a moment. Then she moved forward to help.
When they got back, the camp had settled into its late rhythms. She left Jake with Miller and two others near the medical tent and went to wash her hands at the water barrel, her face next, the cold water stinging against the scrape along her cheekbone. The blood had dried. The mark would bruise by morning — she could feel the swelling beginning, that particular tightening heat. She wrapped her wrist herself, checking the joint carefully, then flexed her fingers and accepted the result.
She was tying off the wrap when Finn appeared, moving with that careful gait of someone with a healing wound. Raven was beside him.
"What happened?" Finn asked, looking at her face.
"I fell outside the wall." She kept her hands moving. "I'm fine."
Raven's eyes moved over her with a sharpness that didn't let anything pass. "You sure?"
"Yes." Lily tied off the wrap. "Finn, you should be sitting down."
"I've been sitting down for four days." He said getting closer to her. "Have you fallen from a cliff?"
Lily was about to answer when they heard shouting from across the camp.
All three of them turned. Someone was running from the dropship entrance. One of Bellamy's boys, still half-breathless, his eyes scanning the camp.
"The Grounder," he called out. "He's gone. Someone left the hatch open — he got loose—"
The news settled over the camp the way bad news always settled — first the hush, then the rising voices, then the controlled chaos of people who had always known something would go wrong and had only been waiting for the shape of it. Lily stood very still. She looked at Raven. At Finn. At the camp organizing itself around this new fact, someone already moving toward the dropship.
"We need Bellamy and Clarke," Lily said sharing a look with Finn that was standing next to her.
Please, come back soon, she thought as she pressed her rewrapped wrist lightly against her chest. Outside the east wall, in the direction they had not checked tonight, the forest was dark and entirely silent.