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ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT
BEFORE BREAKFAST
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[ this chapter is gonna be a little different.
not much is happening at camp haha,
so we're gonna switch around pov's like the show
i hope no one minds! ]
THE MORNING THEY LEAVE TO MEET CLARKE goes catastrophically ━━ but, to be completely honest, Lyra should have expected things wouldn't have been anything less than disastrous, as they so often are. Of course, she might have been distracted by the fact that Indra not only sent her to meet Clarke with her own entourage but ━━ and youll never believe this ━━ horses. That's right ━━ Lyra Jupiter gets to ride an actual, real life, living and breathing horse!
See, Clarke had been in Tondc while Lyra and Octavia played Chancellor and Grounder respectively. Now Clarke's on her way back, and the Grounders sent riders to meet her when she crossed the border from Trikru into what's quickly becoming Skaikru territory. Noah offered to take the lead on that mission and Lyra joined him.
Everything is going fine at first. OK, so maybe riding a horse is a little bit more difficult than Lyra imagined. So maybe her and Toulouse ━━ she took the liberty of naming the pretty, chestnut maned stallion herself ━━ got off to a bit of a rough start. And by a bit, Lyra means Toulouse might have thrown her off his back three times and then nearly stomped on her with his hooves. But now things are going absolutely swimmingly, and that's all that matters.
Suddenly, Toulouse jerks to a stop, nearly sending Lyra flying over his head. She shrieks, holding onto the reigns for dear life as her head jerks wildly, trying to figure out what's happened.
Though Noah's mare trots to a much more gentle halt, he still looks queasy. "I'm gonna throw up."
"It's not that bad," says Lyra.
"Oh, yes, it most definitely is," he retorts, nearly falling from his mare as she shakes her mane out gently. "I'll bet Kane didn't have to ride a horse. Lucky bastard."
"Mom, why are we stopping?" Clarke demands, sliding off of her mare in irritation.
Abby's crouched at the edge of the river that trickles by the dirt path they've been riding. After Lyra dismounts Toulouse, the stallion whinnying wildly, she trails after Clarke to see that Abby's filling a silvery flask with water.
"You need to drink, too," says Abby, holding out the flask to Clarke.
"I'm fine," Clarke insists briskly, in very Clarke-like manner. "We're almost home."
"What about you, Lyra?"
"No way," says Lyra, already jogging back to Toulouse, forgetting her manners in her haste. "I need to get back to that radio. Bellamy must have made contact by now."
Abby rounds on Noah. "You're just going to let her do that?"
He snorts. "Do what? Say no to a drink?"
"Let her get away with whatever the hell she wants!"
"She's only killed one person. So," Noah retorts. "I think she's fine."
"Yeah," says Abby, her voice low and brittle, an edge of austerity to her words. "You've let her run around a forest full of killers with a gun, watched her go to Tondc where one of her friends was wanted for murder, and then were completely fine when the Commander of the Grounders asked for her to attend a war council meeting where they got attacked by a beast!"
Noah's mouth briefly snaps apart, startled, then squares his broad shoulders as his features turn stony.
"I know you've got the whole creepy control-freak thing going on with Clarke," he says lowly, stiffly. "But I have something you don't - I trust my daughter."
He starts to stalk off, but Abby's next words make him halt in his step.
"On the Ark, you said you wanted to do better, Noah. But you're still a terrible father."
Something inside of him snaps.
Whipping around, he strides towards Abby quickly, getting dangerously close to her as his cobalt eyes flash. "I don't give a shit whether you're the Chancellor or fucking Jesus Christ himself - you don't get to tell me how to parent my daughter. I know what I'm doing."
To his disdain, she seems amused.
"I'm sure you knew what you were doing while Lyra was being tortured."
His brow furrows. "What - ?"
He doesn't get to finish his thought. Gunfire explodes through the air.
Terror sinks it's icy claws into his chest as he whirls around, his heart threatening to burst from his ribcage. His cobalt eyes instantly find Lyra and a small fiber of him manages to relax as he realizes she's fine, that his daughter is alive and whole and safe. But that relief only lasts a fraction of a moment. One of the Grounder Riders slumps over in his saddle, blood trickling down the nape of his neck and staining his armor as his horse paces back and forth in agitation. He'd been shot.
"Mountain Men!" Clarke shouts, digging her heels into her horses flank. "Lyra - "
"I'm with you!"
Horrified, Noah watches as his daughter charges towards the gunfire.
For once, Lyra and Toulouse seem to be perfectly in synch with one another. The stallion follows her lead as she directs him towards where the gunshot had come from. She grunts with exertion as his hooves beat ruthlessly upon the earth, galloping through the tall grass at the heel of Clarke's own horse, their Grounder guard following behind them swiftly. Her heart ricochets inside of her ribcage, a civil war of rage and dread mauling at her insides.
The Mountain Men are trying to kill you. Her grip tightens on the reign. Don't let them get away.
"Finish him!" Indra's command breaks through the air and as Toulouse gallops closer, Lyra sees Octavia with her sword at the neck of a man in a hazmat suit.
"Octavia, wait!" Lyra cries out, Toulouse skidding to a halt, whipping up dirt beneath his hooves, speckling her ankles. "If he's from Mount Weather, we can use him! Don't let him die!"
Octavia gives her a jerky nod, then kicks the man to the ground. Lyra can hear his agonized screams despite his helmet and her skin prickles. His hazmat suit must have torn. He's been exposed to radiation.
Clarke seems to realize the same thing. "Check to see if he's got a patch kit! We've got to get him back to camp."
One of the Grounders holds the writhing Mountain Man down as Octavia retrieves something from his pack. There's a second body just past that, which Lyra can make out as the ferns dip and her breath catches in her throat. The second Mountain Man is completely still. An arrow is protruding from his back. He must already be dead.
Octavia snatches something from the pack, but it doesn't look like a patch kit.
"What is that?" Clarke questions.
"Lyra!" Octavia calls sharply, starting to jog towards them. Her oily hair is pulled back tightly in several thick braids that bounce against her back. "You, Clarke, and Lexa were the targets."
She thrusts a bundle of photos into Clarke's hands, handing off two more to Lyra.
Fingers trembling, Lyra's eyes flicker wildly between the two photos in her hands. There's one of her with Indra that only could have been taken the other day; it's her greeting the warrior and welcoming her into Camp Jaha. The second is slightly older, showing her half-dragging Lincoln's unconscious body towards the charred dropship. It must have been taken the day she'd escaped the tunnels, just after she'd found Bellamy and Octavia.
Mount Weather hadn't stopped watching her.
Limbs quaking like ice, Lyra drags a dirt-speckled strand of hair from her cheek as she glances around, pulse throbbing in her throat. Indra's given a command to one of the riders and he turns swiftly, the only word she recognizes is Heda. Clarke looks paler than usual, even Indra stiff and uncertain as she eyes her. Breathing in furious pants, Lyra forces steadiness into her voice.
"So Mount Weather's pissed we're cutting their blood supply," she says. "We knew this would happen. It. . . it makes sense they'd try to kill us. This is what we've prepared for."
Her words ring in the clearing. She realizes with a start that everyone is looking at her.
Octavia offers her a tiny grin. "Long ways from the overemotional crybaby in Earth Skills."
"I was the perfect amount of overemotional," retorts Lyra, but she's starting to grin, too. "Anyways, what happened to you?"
Octavia's grin broadens. "I joined the Grounders."
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CAMP JAHA is thrown into chaos as they hurtle through the gates. Dismounting Toulouse swiftly, Lyra ignores Noah's outstretched palm and lands upon the earth with a thud. Abby is barking orders as Jackson comes scrambling from Alpha Station with a team of medics prepped to take the Mountain Man and the Grounder that had been shot. There is no time to catch her breath. A wild hurricane of thoughts roaring inside of her skull, Lyra drops Toulouse's reigns and ignores her dad as she sprints after them and into medical.
"Lock that down!" Noah barks somewhere behind her. "Close the gate! Move! Move!"
Costa, the man whose helping carry the Mountain Man, strides through the halls swiftly with Lyra at his heels as Abby and Clarke lead the way. "Let's go - go! Move!"
They race down the dimly lit corridors that smell of rain and mildew. Indra marches behind, shouting things to the Grounders that Lyra cannot comprehend. Civilians flatten themselves against the walls, looking at the furore in a panic.
"Jackson, we've got two patients!" Abby shouts as they burst through medical's doors. "You get the radiation burns, I've got the gunshot wounds!"
Jackson rushes over to help Costa, Clarke, and Lyra just as Abby starts to shout for O-Neg blood.
"This guy is from Mount Weather," Clarke informs him as they rush to get the soldier onto the stretcher, his breath fogging the glassy mask of his hazmat suit. "We need to keep him alive. There was a tear in his suit, but we fixed it in the field."
Raven comes in and Lyra furiously shakes off any shock leftover from the attempted assassination.
"Has Bellamy called in yet?"
Staring at the Mountain Man with some semblance of surprise, Raven manages to shake her head. "No."
"Then why aren't you at the radio?" Clarke somehow manages to demand, in the middle of shining a light through the hazmat suit to check his pupils.
"Octavia just took my place! How about you back off?"
Lyra picks at her nails incessantly, hardly feeling the skin rip and pinprick of blood at her thumb. Anxiety starts to gnaw at her insides. "He should have made contact by now. Why hasn't he made contact yet?"
Too much is happening too fast; no one answers her.
"No!" Clarke says loudly as Jackson goes to remove the hazmat suit. "Leave it on. It's the only thing keeping him alive."
"How can we treat a guy if we can't touch him?"
"We can rig up some scrubbers in the airlock," says Raven, a hand cupping Lyra's shoulder. "Give us twenty minutes."
"Hang on, I want to check the radio - "
"Lyra! Work on the airlock!" Clarke says fiercely, not giving her any room for argument. "The best way to help Bellamy is by keeping the Mountain Man alive."
Lyra's fingers curl and then her mouth presses together thinly. "Fine. Let's go."
Shoulders tensed, she and Raven leave medical just as Abby starts to perform CPR on the Grounder with the gunshot wound, her hands soaked a hideous scarlet. Hardly phased, Lyra's walk turns to a jog as she and Raven weave in and out of Ark personnel, heading for the airlock.
"Where's Sinclair?" Lyra asks, dodging a heavyset woman with a hasty Excuse me!
"Engineering," Raven calls as they run. "He'll - "
"Lyra!"
"Dad?"
Lyra skids to a halt just before she can run straight into her dad, watching him rake a quivering hand through his short-cropped hair. "Dad, I'm really sorry, but I have to rig up scrubbers in the airlock and then I need to get to the radio - "
"Let someone else do it this time." Noah sounds unusually anxious. "We need to talk."
"I'm sorry, dad, but I can't," Lyra tries to go around him as she watches Raven's bobbing ponytail disappear into the crowd. "Dad, really - " She's cut off as he grabs her by the shoulders, forcing her to look him in the eyes. Taken aback, she blinks. Somehow, his wrinkles seem more prominent. "What is it?"
"Someone tried to kill you, today," he says, looking stricken. "You deserve a break."
Lyra starts to laugh, only Noah doesn't. She blinks. "Oh, wait. . . you're being serious right now?"
"Why the hell would I be joking about that?"
"Because I'm pretty sure someone's tried to kill me every single day that I've been on the ground," she says, shrugging him off easily as his features go slack. "What? It's not a big deal. I haven't died yet, have I?"
Her dad looks at her in shock. She gives him a smile, then sprints towards the south airlock.
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"LYRA DID A good job. The airlock is radiation free."
Noah Jupiter swallows with some difficulty as Marcus Kane speaks from just beside him. He isn't looking at Marcus and instead stares at the Mountain Man who'd been tasked with assassinating his daughter, the man who tried to kill her, the very same man whose life she's saved. He's never been a particularly neurotic man ━━ spending most of your life black out drunk will do that to you ━━ but now his emotions feel elastic, elongated, tugged so that that they quiver and threaten to snap at any moment.
"Abby says he'll wake up soon," continues Kane, oblivious to his plight.
"He shouldn't get to wake up."
Kane turns to him in mild surprise. Noah himself is unnerved by the ferocity in his words, but he shrugs it off. It's true.
"He tried to murder my daughter," he says, fighting the urge to scream. Fighting the urge to scream until his throat is raw and dripping ruby, mouth stained with bitter iron. A wrathful growl spews from his mouth as his shoulders become rigid with tension. "He tried to murder my daughter, Marcus!"
"Hey, hey. . . " Kane clamps a steady hand around his shoulder, bracing him. "Lyra's a strong girl. She'll push through this."
"I know. That's the problem." Noah shrugs Kane off from him, beginning to stalk back and forth as the Mountain Man's chest rises and falls evenly. "She shouldn't have to be strong. Not like this."
"Noah - "
"She was tortured, Marcus!" Noah bursts, a sickening despair exploding through his veins. "She was tortured and she didn't even tell me!"
Kane's face falls. "I should have said something earlier."
"It's not your fault," Noah mutters, one hand rising to coil in his hair. "And I don't even think she meant to hide it from me! She - she's been so caught up with the Grounder politics and now Mount Weather that she never even had the chance too!"
A distressed sob scratches at his voice as he starts to splutter. He forces himself to grit his teeth before continuing.
"There were three people in those photographs. The Commander, Clarke, and Lyra. Do you know what this means?"
Kane ducks his eyes from Noah's. "Yes."
"It means they see her as a threat!" Noah exclaims sharply, bitterly. "Maybe not a leader, but she's just as important as the Commander. Even if she doesn't see it herself. And what makes it even worse is that the Grounder's are starting to look at her like that, too."
"Clarke is still the head of the alliance," Kane tries to cajole him, but it hardly works.
Noah's mouth pulls into a bitter scowl. "But Lyra's the glue holding it together. Everyone knows that."
"Come on," says Kane softly. "You used to be so proud of Lyra. Always bragging about how your daughter was the savior of the human race, the only thing keeping those kids alive on the ground. And when you found out she managed to escape Mount Weather, you never let me hear the end of it."
Pulse thumping unpleasantly in his throat, Noah's features are swamped with sticky grey shadows.
"I am proud of her," he insists, despite the aching cavity in his chest. "But I made her mother a promise, once. That I'd never let anything harm our daughter."
He can barely look at Kane now, shame welling within him. It feels like his blood is mercury, dragging him down to hell. All he wants is his wife in his arms again. All he wants is for him and his wife and Lyra to be together again.
"I already broke that promise twice. When I started to drink, and when Lyra was sent to the ground."
He reaches up and touches the chain around his neck, the same chain that his wife had gifted him all those years ago. But his fingers jerk away just as quickly, air hissing between his teeth.
The wedding rings seems to burn like fire.
His breath shudders, but he forces steel into his voice as he faces Kane. The silver chain and the wedding ring hang around his neck, heavy as a promise.
"I will not break that promise again."
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A HIGH-PITCHED WHINE screeches in the air. It's the most horrible noise Lyra's ever heard in her life, a loud and screechy wailing that fills the engineering room. Digging her fingernails into the groove that runs all the way around the silvery stick, Lyra's finger jabs the button and shuts it off.
"Sounds worse than my dad singing in the shower," Lyra says, trying to shake the ringing noise from her ears. "This is what they use to control the Reapers?"
Clarke nods, taking her hands off from her ears. Beside her, Raven's face is pinched in pain.
"No wonder they're nuts. I'd go crazy too, if all I could hear is this," mutters Lyra, turning the tone generator over in her hands. "Yeah, I can definitely replicate this frequency."
"Good," says Clarke curtly. "If we can neutralize the Reapers, the tunnels are an option. You and Raven need to get on it."
"You don't need to give me orders, Clarke," says Raven edgily. "I know what to do."
Jasper's message continues to loop over and over on the radio: "This is Jasper Jordan. We need help. Forty-seven of us are trapped inside of Mount Weather. . . "
Lyra isn't quite sure how to talk to Raven anymore, but thankfully she doesn't have to as footsteps thud towards them. Her eyes snap open and she starts to grin as she sees Octavia approaching, though it quickly turns to a grimace. Octavia's black eye seems to have worsened.
"Nice black eye," she says.
"You too. We're matching," Octavia fires back. "Have you heard anything from Bell yet?"
Lyra's fingers curl. "No."
"Lincoln is still missing too," says Octavia before rounding on Clarke. "He should be back by now."
"They'll be OK," Clarke assures her.
"They better be," remarks Raven, not bothering to glance up at Clarke and instead taking the tone generator from Lyra's hands. "Your whole plan rests on Bellamy getting in."
"He will," Lyra insists.
The intercom chimes and a mechanical voice echoes overhead: "Councillor Kane, Sergeant Jupiter, Clarke Griffin, Lyra Jupiter - please report to the south airlock immediately."
"We'll finish this later," says Clarke, swiftly starting for the hall.
Lyra looks to Octavia helplessly before rising from her seat and taking after Clarke. "Tell me if Bellamy says anything. And please don't get another black eye!"
"You too!"
"Clarke, wait up!" Lyra calls as she enters the corridor, and the blonde reluctantly slows. "South airlock is the prisoner, isn't it? I thought he wasn't talking."
"He wasn't," says Clarke agitatedly. "All we got was his name. Carl Emerson, Mount Weather security detail."
Lyra halts mid-step. "Emerson?"
"What is it?" Clarke asks. "You know him?"
Lyra doesn't answer; she only walks faster.
Lyra reaches the airlock before anyone else. Abby is standing there, her shoulders slumped as if she holds an impossible weight. Any other time she would have felt sympathetic, but not today. Instead she approaches the mammoth window slowly, her jaw locked as she faces the man inside the airlock. His neck no longer blisters from radiation exposure; her people had saved him.
"You," she utters slowly, eyes locked on him. "It was you. I heard you on the radio during the hurricane - I thought I was going crazy or something, but I managed to tap your radio frequency by accident. . . and it was you who brought me into Mount Weather!"
Emerson remains motionless. He only stares at her.
"I don't get it," says Lyra, shaking her head furiously. "I'm the only one that wasn't on the dropship. Why bother coming for me at all?"
Kane comes jogging from the corridor, Clarke and her dad in tow. "Did he say something?"
"No," says Lyra, forcing herself to look away from Emerson. But she cannot relax, not now.
"His blood did," says Abby quietly, staring at Emerson though it is Kane she addresses. "Jackson found genetic marker anomalies that can only come from someone who was born on the Ark."
Clarke and Lyra exchange horrified glances.
"It's started," whispers Clarke.
"Hold on," says Noah, stepping forwards. "It could've come from the blood transfusion that we gave him."
"No. I took the sample before that."
Cracks, tiny, twisted, terrible little cracks begin to crawl through Lyra's heart. Abby's words swell and march through her rib cage like an army of death and the air suddenly becomes cold. Emerson's eyes glitter in the malevolent tandem. A hideous monster caged within an airlock, a man she had saved, only to find out that he's already begun killing her friends.
Her voice is so quiet she can barely hear herself. "They're bleeding my friends."
"We don't know that - " begins Kane.
"Yes, we do," Clarke interjects coldly. "We were genetically engineered. They weren't."
Emerson only stares at Lyra.
A python seems to have constricted around her chest. Coiling, crushing, compressing. Squeezing the air from her lungs, driving fractures through her heart until she thinks she might explode. The air is so, so cold now. It's almost painful. They're bleeding my friends. The thought rakes through her skin. They're bleeding my friends. As if they are nothing. Like everything is a game, like her friends are not people but instead pieces on a board. As if Emerson is playing the part of a gambling god.
"What are you doing?" Kane demands, barring Clarke from the airlock as she begins to barrel forward.
"Killing him. Get out of my way, Kane."
"Calm down," Kane tells her.
"Calm down?" Lyra echoes quietly.
"Lyra," Noah starts towards her. "Take it easy."
"I have been taking it easy," Lyra fires back, stepping away from him, ignoring the hurt that flashes across his face. "I abandoned everyone in Mount Weather, I left them there. I killed Wells for that. . . And I. . . And I let Bellamy go, and if he. . . if he's dead, then it's all my fault - "
Her voice starts to break and she blinks furiously.
"I need to know if Bellamy's OK," says Lyra, her voice cracking again. "Let me ask Emerson. And if he's not, if all our friends really are dead. . . "
"Then we'll kill him," says Clarke fiercely.
"No!" Abby says loudly, striding towards the two girls, words sharp as knives. "You are not in charge here. We do things my way."
Clarke's eyes seem dead as she stares at her mother. Slowly, excruciatingly, she manages a nod.
Then she takes off down the corridor.
Lyra goes to follow her, but her dad grabs her by her jacket sleeve.
"Lyra, you're going to hurt yourself if you keep running around like this. You're not in charge here, let the adults handle this - "
Hurt flashes across Lyra's face and she stumbles back from him. "What, you don't trust me?"
His face falls. "No, of course I do, I just - "
"You just what? Don't think I can handle this?" Lyra demands, taking one small step backwards and then another. "I can. I can do this, dad."
Before he can stop her, she is storming back towards engineering. Her heart is crumbling within her chest as she hears her dad shouting after her, but she ignores him and starts to move faster. All the while, she can only think one thing:
Please don't let Bellamy be dead. . .
͙*̩̩͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩̥͙ ✩ *̩̩̥͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩͙‧͙ .·͙*̩̩͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩̥͙ ✩ *̩̩̥͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩͙‧͙
the way i can write 4k chapters but not write 300 words for an english assignment. . . ugh, my mind is so powerful