Ground Down

Chapter 10

"Mom?" Clarke pushed the curtain to med bay out of the way, greeted by the annoyed glare of a sleepy soldier with more bandages than cheek left. "Sorry. Mom..?" she took the next left, spied into her broom cabinet of an office. Empty.

With an exasperated sigh, Clarke went through her mother's desk. Papers, more papers, printed scan, map of Arkadia she couldn't fault her for keeping because the place was the pinnacle of poor design, shitty-looking book, book advising how to medicine, frayed out dictionary, pens, more pens, she slammed the drawers back shut. Not a single note as to why she had called her and ordered her to Arkadia. She didn't even know why she'd listened. Maybe because she hadn't seen much of Abby lately, her mother spent her time between Arkadia and the hospital and that talk about hey, daughter, I took your dead father's seat on the council, that had never happened. Not that it surprised her. 

A name tag caught her eye. It had gotten itself wedged between the bin and the wheels of the chair, she tugged it free to hold it into the artificial light. Doctor Abigail Griffin, Chief Medical Examiner. So much for taking long shifts at the hospital. 

"Fuck you, mom." She tossed it onto the desk. 

Arkadia was built like a bagel somebody had started to eat and found to be disgusting. Not that she had any general problems with bagel-shaped buildings, it just seemed utterly impractical to her to build them standing up rather than flat on the ground. And then extend them from each narrow end instead of filling the half-hole that remained when you stuck a bagel to the ground upright. Clarke took a turn into just one of those extensions. 

They'd taken her name at the gate. There had been guards at the gate. More than a week before. Maybe her mother wanted to talk about that, they had had one lovely falling out over the reinforcements Pike had put in place around the seat of their council after news had come that the new Commander had reclaimed a large part of Trishana territory, because Clarke thought that was impressive for a week and her mother thought it was reckless to fight out there while the Coalition clung to a single frayed thread. That had been after the lovely falling out about whether she should be going out partying with Bellamy and wake up in a ditch in the morning with not many recollections of the night and cause her mother what her mother claimed was a sleepless night, which Clarke had told her she was causing herself with how persistently she avoided her home being in the hospital and in Arkadia. 

The door to the operations hub slapped her in the face. Actually, it slapped her into every part at the front of her body because it didn't whir open and she collided with it like Wile-E Coyote chasing the Road Runner. Which really didn't help the nausea that hadn't let go of her since the Conclave, she stepped back with one hand on her nose. From behind the glass, an Asian-looking boy she vaguely recognised stared at her like she had two heads. 

"Clarke-" the door whirred open, Jasper adjusted his stupid goggles- "What're you doing here?" 

"Got summoned by my mom. The fuck?" She gestured at the door. 

"You need a card to get in now." He fished one out of his pocket that he had leashed to the fabric with some string. "Y'know, to keep the soldiers out."

"He's mad!" 

She moved to the table where the Asian boy tensed up at her presence, one hand awkwardly raised to obstruct the computer from her. 

"It's fine, she's Dr Griffin's daughter-" Jasper shoved her aside to sit, she leaned over his shoulder- "I'll vouch for her. I tell her everything anyway."

"Dude!" Asian-looking boy opened his hands in a the-fuck gesture. 

A row of bleeping dots on the monitor revealed themselves to be mines, she turned the device to herself to get a better view. Pike had cleared out the base. Well, he had cleared the civilians out of the base and propped them up in the makeshift operations hub at Arkadia that was really not made to hold so many people. She curled her fingers around the edge of the desk, following the red line that connected mines where a chain-reaction would be set in motion should one be triggered.