what you would have done
She wants to be the good guy. She wants to believe so badly that there can be good guys and bad guys, like in the old movies they'd watch on the Ark. That there's a right choice instead of just the painful, necessary one, the choice that protects what's hers at the cost of everything else.
She doesn't want this. But she shoots Dante Wallace, and Cage still won't back down.
The path Mount Weather's leaders have chosen in the past three generations is stupidly short-sighted, selfish, cruel, evil. If they'd asked the grounders for help, instead of simply taking what they want -- if they'd practiced exogamy, married out, they might have acquired resistance to the radiation through inheritance. If they'd asked her people for help, they could have worked something out that left them all alive. But the Wallaces don't seem to see anyone other than their own as really human: just savages, outsiders, interlopers, threats.
(She doesn't want to see the parallels with how her own people look at the grounders, but she's not blind. It'll take time for the Arkers to accept they aren't the only humans left in the universe. Hopefully they'll manage the adjustment better than the Mountain has.)
But that's the Wallaces. She can't hold all the inhabitants of Mount Weather at fault for the sins of their leaders. There are children here. And people who've helped her own, at risk of their lives.
But Cage will not back down. And that's her mother, on the screen in front of her. Those are her people. That's her mother. Her responsibility. She didn't want this, but she knew, she knew when Lexa sounded the retreat that this was probably the choice she'd have to make, if she was to have any chance at all.
Mount Weather's leaders have made their choices. Cage thinks she'll flinch. Cage thinks she's weak. Cage will kill all of her people and then his will be free of the Mountain, free to go anywhere on the surface. Free with their guns and their acid fog and their complete certainty that they're the only ones who matter.
She's already responsible for three hundred deaths. Nearly six hundred, counting the people she chose not to save at Tondisi. More, if she counts the ones she let the Hundred kill with their ignorance, when they launched those futile flares.
Those are her friends down there. Her mother. Kane. Bar Clarke herself -- and Bellamy -- they're all that's left of what passes for leadership among the Arkers. There's a cold, logical core beneath her anguished heart that tells her letting Cage kill them is tantamount to sentencing the rest of her people to death, too: Kane has become a voice of reason, and Abby, for all her faults, is their most experienced doctor -- besides Jackson, the only one to survive to reach the ground.
She's not weak. She can live with three hundred more lives on her conscience, to keep her people safe.
And with Emerson outside the door, they're out of time.
Bellamy is white-faced. Monty is staring at her, eyes wide, shocked -- he never expected it would come to this, she thinks: he expected she'd find some other way. (She hoped for that, too, but in the back of her mind she knew that this was the only leverage they'd really have, and there was always the chance that Cage wouldn't think she had the guts to carry through.)
Her hand is sweaty on the lever. Her heart hurts. Her stomach hurts. This isn't triage. This is --
"I have to save them," she whispers. I have to.
Bellamy's hand fits over hers, trembling. "Together," he offers. But she can't, she can't, let him carry this too. Only one of them needs to bear it.
I bear it so they don't have to, says the memory of Dante's voice in her ear.
"No, Bellamy." Her voice is a thin, cracked thing, but strong enough, for all that. "This is mine to carry."
She pushes his hand aside, and brings the lever down.