every good part of him
Every good part of him is good because of Mbege. Mbege is the reason he likes and remembers poetry; he is the reason that Murphy survived lockup. He is the best friend a person could ever hope to have. He was terrible, too, in a lot of ways; neither of them were going to ever get out of there: their crimes were too violent and prison didn’t make them any less volatile. And he died, maybe because of the information that Murphy spilled to the Grounders, and when they went to his grave, the Chancellor couldn’t have cared less about his body.
They had the same initials. Mbege’s parents would visit him in lockup, and sometimes after those visits, Mbege would talk about some vague future where they both lived and Mbege’s parents were proud of both of them. It was a nice dream. Murphy would crush it every single time, every opportunity he could, and then they would fight, and that was good. And sometimes they would get caught, and each get put in solitary, and that was the worst thing in the world, but most of the time they wouldn’t, and one of them would win and they would lie together on the floor of their cell, and maybe Mbege would pull out a scrap of paper and read a fraction of a poem or a story to Murphy.
Anyhow. He’s thinking about this because Raven’s looking at a screen most of the time, and there’s the date written, and it’s his birthday, and Mbege’s was two days ago. And then Bellamy wants to call a planning meeting, and he’s off-kilter and everything is already wrong.
—
“We could take someone from the City of Light and —“ Murphy is suggesting, feeling out of his skin and tingly, anxious and out-of-place and wired. This isn’t his gig. He does what he’s told; he’s never been any good at planning.
“No,” Raven is saying, again. “Everything that one person in the City of Light knows, everybody else knows pretty much instantly. You can’t think of the people in the City of Light as individuals, they’re all the same person, and that person is ALIE.” Whatever, whatever, whatever. It all sounds impossible, so he doesn’t believe it.
Bellamy put together a team easily: Miller as his right hand, always, the one he trusts the most. Bryan follows close behind; Harper brings up the rear. In the rafters, Murphy serves as a sniper; Ryfe has taught him to shoot, to see from above. Jasper acts as a distraction; the unreliable wild card: he makes a lot of noise and he has a death wish, so he’s excellent for the job. Raven is on mission support back at the dropship: she has issued each of them a radio. Bellamy wants to make a plan and he wants to go over the plan again and again, and Murphy is sick of it, all of it, and Raven is tense and doesn’t like him and nobody really needs him here, he’s just an annoying distraction.
When they’re caught up into each other’s arguments again, out of focus, Murphy slips out the door. He has a partly-smashed lighter from who knows where tucked into the bottom drawer of his desk; he retrieves it and goes into the forest, sets the grass on fire and stamps it out with his foot, does it again and again, trying to unwind the knot that is his chest. Burns himself a little, maybe accidentally, washes it in the cool water of the running river. Returns back to camp feeling calmer, if not by much.
The heist goes fine. Murphy can see everything well, warns the team when they go too far, the radios work great, Jasper doesn’t do too much stupid shit.
And. Raven is happy with them. Raven fiddles with her mechanical whatever and she frowns and she has the chips and she’s happy for now. Harper’s face relaxes; she excuses herself early to presumably find Monty. Miller makes some kind of food for them, maybe the chickens he’s been raising haphazardly with Bryan: it’s delicious and Murphy watches him hold hands with his boyfriend, fingers into palms into warmth. He holds his own hand, like he can replicate the experience, but it doesn’t really help. He sits by the fire and tries his best not to look sulky, but hey, his face is just kind of built that way. He stays like that, staring at that orange that can exist only in flame, thoughts drifting and semi-bitter, until Bellamy’s hand comes across his shoulders and says, “Hey, I’m heading to bed, are you with me?” which is good anyway because Harper has returned to the scene and Monty is with her and he’s carrying moonshine, and he tries to avoid both of those things best he can.
So he follows Bellamy, and he toes off his boots by the door, and he climbs his ladder. And he realizes how tired he is. In his bones, in his skin, in his head. His eyes flutter closed, except —
Except he’s still alive, and he somehow didn’t expect to be, today. A careful review reminds him why he’s so melancholy. He says aloud, “My review would have been today.”
“Huh?” says Bellamy from beneath him.
“I turned eighteen,” he says. And then, considering: “They would have floated me. It was a violent crime, and prison didn’t make me any better, and both my parents are dead.”
“Congratulations,” says Bellamy, but he sounds distracted. He’s probably reading.
He has to sleep. He has to sleep now, or he risks crying, and he’s not interested in that tonight. Things will be better in the morning, or at the very least, muted. “Can you,” says Murphy, and has to swallow. “Can you read aloud to me,” he says, and still drops out at the end.
Silence. Murphy assumes the answer is no, and is almost asleep anyway, until Bellamy’s honey-warm voice floats up to him.
There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you’ve been living, it seems
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.
You’ve stopped being here in this world.
You’re in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.
You’re not a creature in body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.
Then you’re in the world again.
at night, on the cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.
You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but that the relation is false.
You see again how far away
every thing is from every other thing.
He files that away for use, later, for comfort. The stars; being among them, and then here, on the ground, below them. And his relation to the night sky. And then he really is asleep, and his dreams are fitful, but they are tolerable, and he wakes nobody with them.
—
The second heist goes just as well.
The third time, Raven wants something different. She wants the backpack where A.L.I.E lives, or the mainframe where A.L.I.E uploaded herself. And it might go okay, except — Except things go wrong, because third time’s the charm, after all.
Jasper has some kind of unexplained crisis, and there’s a lot of noise, and Murphy doesn’t care, he can barely pretend to care when he’s required to, except then Raven announces that Jasper will be running mission support with her, and Monty will be replacing Jasper as a distraction. And then there’s a hushed, frantic conversation that Miller has with Bellamy, and Bellamy asks him if he’ll swap with Monty; Murphy as a distraction with Monty sniping from above.
Which, okay, sure. Whatever. One of them is a trained professional and one is not, but whatever. He does what he’s told.
So he draws them out, away from the room Raven indicated; A.L.I.E’s soldiers: they move, inexplicably, as one mass: except for Jaha — and. He wants. He remembers his father in the airlock, begging for his life, and Jaha’s impassable face.
Raven won’t give him the command. He won’t do it. Not now.
He does his best to confuse the herd, buys them time. There’s a crackle over the radio, Bellamy is counting off and asking each of them to check in safely. It means that he’s got the backpack.
They’re surrounding him now. He’s not going to get out. He realizes this all at once: he hasn’t bargained for how they move as one cohesive unit, with Jaha as their wild card. He’s fucked up, and he can blame Monty all he likes, but the blame falls on him, on his bloodthirst, on his shortsightedness. He takes a deep breath.
They can’t kill him. They can’t kill him, because they want him to take the chip, and he has to consent to that. He is functionally safe. He is safe.
“Murphy?” Bellamy is saying, like an afterthought. “You good?”
“Do you have it?” Murphy asks, although he’s not supposed to: they always talk in code over the radio.
“Yeah,” says Bellamy, and his voice is all relief. “Yeah, we got it. You good?”
“I’ll be good. I'll be there soon,” he says. “I just need a little more time.”
“Great,” says Bellamy. “I’ll see you back at camp.”
And then Murphy goes for his gun, and it’s gone. He can still feel his knife in the bottom of his boot, but that doesn’t do him much good anymore.
Jaha says: “Take a leap of faith with me, John,” and there’s hands at his shoulders and his arms, and someone’s holding out a chip to him. And he looks Jaha straight in the eye and he spits in the Chancellor’s face.
They start hitting him, then: and; You’ve stopped being here in the world. You’re in a different place, a place where human life has no meaning.
And he repeats that, in his head, over and over, and then out loud, until he’s screaming it, and then he can’t do much more of anything.