DISCORDIA

[ 47 ] abandon hope

       Jinny treaded lightly as she gently pushed the foliage in her face to the side, glancing around briefly before stepping out into the open. There were snaps of twigs breaking underfoot and the fronds shuddered noisily as Bellamy followed after her—not as quietly—skidding down the soft incline behind her. He caught up to Jinny with his heavy boots thudding on the ground and leaving an obvious trail in his wake. She winced; so much for being stealthy.

       "Do you really think the Grounders would just give him up?" Jinny asked dubiously. "What if everyone ends up dying because we snuck him out?"

       "Finn's one of us," he told her. "We've got to protect our own."

       "Yeah, but what he did was wrong," she pointed out. "Shouldn't he deserve to be punished?"

       "It was a mistake," Bellamy said, pausing to cast her a significant look. Jinny averted her eyes almost guiltily. The word 'mistake' was something that she was well averse to.

       "Okay, fine," she huffed, continuing on their trek over the forest floor. "It still doesn't feel right to me though."

       "Sometimes the things we need to do aren't always right," he told her, hopping over a fallen log in their way and offering a hand to her.

       Jinny took it, stepping on top of the wooden carcass and springing over it lightly. She pondered over his words in her head, deciding that the only reason she was doing this was because of her friends. Finn had murdered without good reason, and she didn't think she would ever forgive him for such a crime even if it was a mistake. There would always be a rift between them from now on that she had no intention of overcoming.

       She'd known him back on the Ark from Raven, though they hadn't been as close as Jinny was with the mechanic. Finn would sometimes accompany them in the work room, offering to keep an eye out for them as they stole components to build her laptop. She still remembered the day he ran up to her with an excited grin on his face, eyes sparkling as he asked—no, begged—her for a favour. It turned out that he had managed to get his hands on a spacesuit for Raven and wanted her to make sure that they wouldn't get caught. There was nothing Jinny could have done when the alarms blared from the breach though. She supposed she owed it to Raven to keep him safe.

       They finally came to the familiar copse of trees that had been their constant companions during their first month on the ground. The tip of the dropship came into view through the slender trunks in greeting and Bellamy gripped his rifle cautiously as they walked through the battered gate. They crossed the compound, where the white ash had melted into the charred soil from the previous day's drizzle. Jinny ducked behind the parachute canvas and placed her backpack down on the floor as Bellamy surveyed the area outside through the scope of his gun.

       It didn't take very long until they heard another pair of footsteps walking up to the dropship's entrance. They stood at the back of the cabin with their rifles raised at the ready, in case their new companions weren't friendlies after all. Murphy's pale face peeked under the canvas as he walked through and Jinny cocked her charging handle.

       "Whoa, hey, hey!" he exclaimed with his hands raised in the air. "Don't shoot me!"

       Raven entered the dropship right after him with an amused smile despite the frown on her brows. "I brought him along, thought we could use an extra gun."

       "Or an extra pincushion," Jinny smirked in jest before lowering her rifle.

       "Where's Finn and Clarke?" Raven immediately asked, turning her head from side to side as if expecting to see them hidden away in a corner. "They should've been right behind you guys."