FLARES ━ BELLAMY BLAKE ( 1 )

chapter thirty

The panics of Clarke and Anya seemed like background noise to her as she landed on the ground, rocks digging into her bare feet painfully. "Anya! Take my hand!" she heard Clarke yell. The other two dropped to the ground just behind Taylor, where she was breathing quickly, trying to process too much at once.

"We're out," Clarke breathed, looking toward a door that would logically lead directly back into the mountain. Taylor nodded while she hurried over to a pile of furs and started picking up various items of clothing. "Come on, get dressed. We can't cover any ground like this."

Taylor was already kneeling next to her, pulling on the clothing that they had found, trying to think about anything else other than the fact that they belonged to people that had been murdered.

"I won't leave my people behind," Anya objected quietly, still leaned over the cart of dead Grounders. Taylor stared at the clothes numbly and started to pull on various items of clothing over her dirty hospital gown.

"Anya, listen to me, my people are still inside the place too," Clarke told her earnestly, marching back over to where Anya had moved barely an inch. "But they have guards. They have weapons. Once we get out of here, we can find help, we can come back."

"There is no 'we'," Anya snapped, looking at Clarke harshly.

"Shut up. There is no getting out of here unless we work together. But we can leave you here and you can get caught and put back in that place, by all means," Taylor rebuked. Before Anya could say anything in response, loud voices echoed from the other end of the tunnel.

"Someone's coming," Anya announced, while Clarke looked down to the direction of the noise.

"Not just someone. Reapers," she corrected, Taylor's heart skipping a few beats at the mention of them. She remembered everything from when Clarke and Finn had returned to camp with the ghastly descriptions of them and when they had eventually played a part in taking down the Grounders.

Taylor stumbled up from the ground while Anya tried lifting a large rock in means to fight. "Anya, you can't fight! You can barely stand!" Clarke told her in a hushed tone, the voices of the reapers growing ever closer. "I have a better idea."

She pointed to a mining cart and both her and Anya grabbed some clothes from the pile that Taylor had been picking out of and the three of them toppled into the empty cart. The glowing light of torches passed over them and footsteps became louder. Taylor snapped her eyes shut and attempted to cease her breathing

It began to move with a creak as it was pushed down the tracks, a Reaper hovering just above them. Taylor dared not to make any move that would signify that she was alive. A few other bodies sat in the cart with them, completely cold and motionless.

The cart came to stop and the Reapers heaved a body out of the cart just next to them, the person in question undoubtedly alive when they heard the screams that escaped his throat when he was murdered another few feet away.

Clarke shifted next to her while Taylor tried to squeeze her eyes shut and forget about the man who was being killed as she sat at the bottom of the rusty cart. A more peculiar sound echoed through the tunnels, one that sounded like biting. Taylor joined Clarke in looking up above the edge of the cart and watched in horror as the Reapers dug into the man that they had just killed.

"Come on," Clarke urged, mostly looking at Anya, who had barely moved from where she was lying right next to them. She sat up and gently touched the face of the last remaining Grounder that was practically dead in the cart with them. "What are you doing? Let's go."