"She's lying," Emerson rages. "Kill her or I will." He raises his gun but Cage forces his arm down before he can fire.
"Gamma rays destroy electronics, if you're wondering why all your computers are freaking out," Clarke says helpfully. "And you can easily check if it's a bomb, if you have a close look at it. I don't bluff."
"Check it," he snaps at Dr Tsing, jerking his head at Raven's device. She hurries over, still nursing her wounded hand.
Clarke looks over at Octavia, whose entire face is now bloody and bruised. "O, are you okay?"
Octavia spits out some more blood and croaks, "Worth it. Though I will say she tasted awful." She lets out a hoarse laugh as blood trickles down the side of her face.
"I said to tell them everything as soon as possible," Clarke comments, still keeping a wary eye on the rest of the room. "Not get yourself tortured."
"More believable," Octavia says, looking like she's trying to smile. "Plus, I wanted them to think I still had useful information they might be able to get out of me with some more effort. If they thought I told them everything I knew they might have killed me." She has a point, Clarke admits. However, she's not too thrilled with how injured Octavia is, and she suspects Bellamy may well actually try and kill her over this one.
"The laser stamp on the metal says it contains uranium," Tsing says, face paling. "And it does look like the kind of metal they used for the outer layer of nuclear missiles."
"That's what we built it from," Clarke says. "We had a missile up on the Ark, so we brought it down with us. I just knew it would come in use."
Cage curses. He raises his own gun and points it at Clarke. "Disarm it, now," he snaps.
"You won't shoot me unless you want everyone here to die," Clarke says calmly. "You aren't protected down here. The entire Mountain will collapse in on itself. Your guards, your scientists, your children, you... if I let go of this trigger you're all dead."
"Clarke," Abby whispers, looking shocked.
Clarke manages to give her mother a crooked smile. "Hi, Mom. I love you."
"I love you too," Abby replies, but she's staring at Raven's device in mingled fear and horror as she says it.
"You'll kill your own people as well," Emerson says fiercely. "Not just our families, but yours."
"That's a lie," Abby says immediately, trying to sit up but stopped by her restraints. "They're dead, they're all dead, even Thelonious is dead ..." she breaks off into a sob.
Emerson walks up to her and hits her with the butt of his gun. "Shut up," he says viciously. Clarke can't stop herself from flinching. Then he looks at Clarke. "She's wrong," he tells Clarke, trying to keep his voice level. "More than a dozen of your people are still alive."
"You wouldn't keep any of them alive," Clarke says softly, looking at him. "Don't forget, Carl, I know you too. I know exactly what you're capable of, just like you know what I'm capable of. So tell your boss that I'm absolutely capable of blowing us all to hell if I have to, won't you?"
"He's telling the truth, actually," Cage says, his mouth twisting. "Some of our people have... misguided sympathies. The younger ones of your people are being protected by them. You'll kill your own people's children too. There's a dozen of them still alive."
Clarke shrugs, careful to keep her thumb on the button. "That doesn't matter. A dozen lives versus all the ones I could end if I just let go? Not a very good deal. Plus, you'll kill them anyway."
"Maybe not," Tsing says, raising her hands as if to show she's harmless, although Clarke knows she's not harmless at all. She's pleased to note that Octavia's vicious bite is bleeding copiously. "We could keep some alive, let them live here, raise them. It would be useful in case the bone marrow transplants aren't as permanent as they seem."
"I'm not going to disarm this so you can keep children as cattle," Clarke hisses. She glances at her watch. How much time will Lexa need? As long as possible, presumably.
"Then how about disarming it to keep your mother from agonising pain," Cage says, a trace of his former smugness coming back. "I saw your reaction before when Emerson hit her." Emerson moves out of the way as he walks to stand next to Abby and holds his gun against her knee. Clarke's mother shrieks and thrashes, trying to get away, but Cage easily keeps the barrel of the gun on her kneecap even though his eyes are trained on Clarke. "Kneecapping hurts immensely, you know."
Clarke just stares at him, working on keeping her face stone, her eyes cold. "Not as much as having your bone marrow forcibly removed. Like you did to dozens of Sky People."
The soldiers around the room are having quiet conversations with each other, though their eyes remain fixated on Clarke and the trigger she holds. She suspects they're coming up with strategies to grab her while keeping the button down. They must know how difficult that will be to do, though – and they're used to obeying orders, so they're waiting to see what Cage wants them to do. Clarke wonders what kind of idiots would willingly follow someone whose strategies were as psychotic and short-sighted as a typical Bond villain.
One of the soldiers touches a hand to his nose, which has started to bleed. He frowns at his bloody hand in confusion, then wipes his nose against his sleeve, apparently deciding the nosebleed is either random or fear-induced instead of something more serious.
"Sky People? What a charming name," Cage says, his smug smile widening. He clicks the safety off. Abby looks at him, eyes wide and terrified. "Do 'Sky People' love their parents, or are you too much like the savages for things like that to matter to you?"
"Do Mountain Men love their parents?" Clarke retorts. "Where's your loving father, Cage? Dead? Locked up? Or was Dante smart enough to realise that his son was going to stab him in the back and get out before that happened? He must have thought you were losing your mind, talking about time travel and space stations. Or did he finally open his eyes enough to notice that you'd lost your mind long before? Did he realise how empty, how worthless, how pathetic and sociopathic you'd always been?"
Cage's smile fades momentarily. "You don't know anything about my father," he growls. The noise of the gun going off in the confined space is deafening, so much so that it takes a couple of seconds for Clarke to register Abby's agonised scream.
The scream fades into a constant whimpering and breathless sobbing. Abby thrashes against her bonds for a moment and then lets out another wordless exclamation of pain as she jostles her leg.
"She has another knee," Cage says pleasantly. He moves his gun slightly to the left.
"No, no, no!" Abby screams, her face white and taut with pain. "Please! No! You don't have to -"
"You bastard!" Octavia yells hoarsely at Cage, teeth bared like a wild animal. She lets out a snarl of fury. "You're going to die, you miserable, weak, pathetic little mokskwoma , you -"
"We have a volunteer," Cage says, walking around the chair to point the gun at Octavia's knee instead.
Abby lets out a broken little sob. A red tear slides down her face, unnoticed by the others. Blood is swelling up from her shattered knee. Meanwhile, Clarke notices that Emerson has been subtly edging towards the door. To go get more people, perhaps, though what they can do to help the situation she has no idea. It's probably best not to find out.
"Stop moving," she orders him, then turns back to Cage. "This is all pointless," Clarke says clearly, not looking at her mother's face again and definitely not looking at her blood-covered pants leg, though she feels like throwing up. "Because I can't disarm it anyway."
"You what?" Cage glares at her. "What kind of plan -"
"All of us walk out of the Mountain," Clarke says clearly. "You, me, my mother, your people, Sky People, Tree People and Ice People if you've left any of those alive."
"And what?" Emerson says snidely. "You'll leave the bomb here and blow it up?"
"Exactly." Clarke tightens her grip on the trigger. Her hands are starting to become slippery with sweat and the fact that they're still tied isn't helping at all. "We all live. Mount Weather doesn't."
Clarke blinks, and for a second she sees her father standing in front of her instead of Cage. She nearly sighs in relief. The standoff has been going for quite a while now. Lexa's team made it inside, and without any kind of coordinated attack against them or any effective leadership, they must have made it through easily. The only remotely competent people are in this room, arguing over what to do about her.
She recognises the feeling of jobi nuts, the strange lightness and fear mixed together, the way everything's starting to glow a little. It's not good that they seem to be affecting her faster than the others, though. The last thing she needs right now is to start losing her grasp on reality.
"It's a nuclear bomb," Tsing says. For a second she looks distracted, taking a step back from something only she can see. She inhales sharply. "The trigger mechanism wouldn't work from a distance, not through all our levels of protection. We... we wouldn't be able to get far enough. We'd all die of radiation poisoning."
"It seems fair that you would die of radiation poisoning," Clarke says. "But I could leave someone here holding the trigger. That would solve the problem."
"I..." Tsing puts her hand to her head. "What's happening to me?"
A soldier next to her frowns and reaches out to stabilise her. "Doctor?"
"Gamma rays destroy people as well as electronics," Clarke says, giving them a vindictive smile. "You might want to decide on what to do fast. Radiation poisoning is an awful way to die, I've heard."
"This isn't radiation poisoning," Tsing snaps, "We burn in radiation, we don't see things that aren't there."
"But now you have my people's bone marrow in you," Clarke says. She holds back a cough, the smoke from the jobi nuts curling into her. "So you don't burn. You get to die the slow, painful way, like us."
Cage takes several steps back from Raven's device. "Is this possible?" he snaps at Tsing.
"I don't – no!" Tsing says. She struggles against the soldier's grip, looking at him like he's a monster, before coming back to herself. "Sorry, I – no. No. Radiation wouldn't affect our brain first, that's not how it works."
Clarke wonders what Tsing sees when she hallucinates. In her experience, the hallucinations seem to be about what you fear, what you want, what you haven't been able to work through. What would someone like Cage or Tsing experience? Someone so lacking in empathy, that the darkest thing in their world has always been themselves. Maybe for the first time in her life, Tsing is seeing something scarier than herself. Or maybe what she's seeing is herself.
"No, it's not how it works. Firstly, it would make our organs shut down," Clarke says helpfully. She finally allows herself to give in to the desire to cough, amazed it's taken this long to affect her. Her coughing fit goes for nearly a minute before she straightens. No one's taken the opportunity to try and move closer to her. They're all staring, horrified, at the floor, now covered in the blood she just coughed up. She manages a blood-stained smile at them, doing her best to remain standing. "So it seems to have started for me. How are you all feeling?"