IN MY HEAD¹ ━━ Bellamy Blake

𝐗𝐈𝐗. Cloudy With a Chance of Death

     Fuel that should have been burned in the atmosphere. But. . . but then that would mean the RCS thrusters had never pitched the orbiter. There must have been a crew from the monitoring station on the Ark to fire the RCS thrusters as soon as it reached the upper atmosphere, to prepare the ship for landing, and yet that had never happened.

     Why?

     She stands completely still on the crust of the tombstone-grey sky for one moment.

     And then the chasm within her erupts and Lyra starts to run.

    Every last nail of energy she has is hammered into one final cause: finding out what happened. Every last shred of despair is thrust into her ambition, the need to know why, to figure out how the Ark had let a ship of three hundred citizens ━━ her dad ━━ die.

     Something ensnares her foot. She slams into stones, brambles clawing at her skin. Annoyed, she scrambles to her feet, and then she freezes.

It's her mom's Nasa jacket.

Charred along the edges, frayed, with the logo half burnt off. But it's her moms old Nasa jacket all the same. Peppered with dirt and suffused with the stench of burnt gasoline and death, and yet its here and it's all she has left of her parents now.

      Grabbing it, she squeezes it so tightly in her hands that she thinks it might burst into ash.

Under a bleak sky, she races back to the camp.

When she gets there, she bursts straight through the gates, ignoring Harper's shouts from her perch at the gunners position. Lyra hurtles into the communications tent without wasting another moment. There stands Raven, her back completely to her as she fiddles with the shoddy radio.

"I need the radio," Lyra says, skidding to a halt. "Raven, I need it now."

"Lyra? Where the hell have you been? Bellamy's turned the camp upside down looking for you and — " Raven pivots to face her and then her eyebrows contort. "Oh my God... what happened to you?"

"Doesn't matter." Lyra bounces her fingers against her thigh restlessly. "The radio — "

" — is useless. There's nothing but static from the Ark's end."

Lips clamping shut, Lyra falls into a broken silence. Unconsciously, she begins to shiver.

Raven notices instantly. She steps towards her like she's magnetized to the broken girl shaking in front of her and carefully her fingers lift to Lyra's face, brushing dark fizzles from her cheeks. Lyra's eyes are dark and huge in the obsidian shadows and she quivers like a leaf beneath Raven's burning touch.

"Christ, Jupiter," Raven murmurs. "You're covered in Hydrazine."

     Grabbing a damp cloth, Raven gently begins to cleanse the rocket fuel from Lyra's marred skin. Her touch is featherweight as she washes away the harsh cruelties splattering Lyra's skin and the smaller girls eyes flutter as she's doused in something so comforting. When Raven briefly pauses at the edge of raw skin slashed apart like lightning down the side of her cheek, Lyra gives her the tiniest of nods. With her permission, Raven washes away the blood of the sinful scar the Grounder had left her.

     It's over too soon. When Raven draws away from her, Lyra feels the absence of warmth.

     "Bellamy and Clarke are taking a team to investigate the crash-site," Raven tells her quietly. "I'm going with them."