careful now, john
He returns to consciousness and almost immediately wishes he hadn’t. First of all, the headache. Also, like, the pain in general.
Ugh. His shirt and socks are gone. It’s cold.
He’s cuffed to one of the support railings. Rattles that. Ow. He can’t stand up, but it’s not like he’s really interested in doing that.
It’s really bright. It’s very cold. It’s like being in the skybox all over again, except it isn’t the cold of space, it’s coming in through one of the vents. It’s weird that this room is kept so cold when it’s so chilly outside.
Whatever.
Whatever there is, whatever they have planned for him, he just has to endure it until they destroy the backpack. Which will be soon. Raven’s good at what she does. She’s the best.
He’s too cold to sleep, and the headache makes it impossible anyway, so he stares and stares at the cell wall across from him. And he waits.
—
It’s been an hour. It’s been an hour and a half. It’s been two, three, four hours.
Mofi is insubordinate and stubborn, but for the most part, he is not stupid. He always shows up for training. If he doesn’t show up for training, she will find him somewhere in Polis: asleep in his upstairs room, with Prosper in the mess hall, once, in the stables, crying about a beautiful and very old black horse.
He is not in Polis. But she knows where he lives, in broad strokes at least, and she rides for the dropship.
She finds Raven sitting at a firepit, along with a host of other children. Mofi is not among them. Raven looks up at her, and says: “Ryfe,” kind of surprised. Ryfe is surprised herself, that Raven even knows her name.
“Hello,” says Ryfe, the pleasantry strange on her tongue. “Do you know where Mofi is?”
Another child looks up and says bitterly, “Murphy hopped off.”
“What?” says Ryfe.
Raven clarifies. “He means that Murphy left,” she says. “He got us the backpack, and then he figured that he was done, so he left. He’s done it before.”
That doesn’t — make any sense. “Show me.”
Raven takes her there.
—
They take him out twice a day to piss and to work out the kinks in his arms. The second time, before they cuff him, he’s sprayed with a cold blast of water and while he stands there, barefoot and shivering and dripping, he says “Are you going to torture me or what?” because come on, get on with it.
“There is no pain in the City of Light,” says his guard. Then, without prompting: “When you were a kid, your favorite food was strawberries,” he says. “Not the bright, fresh ones grown from Farm Station, but the dehydrated ones brought up from the original astronauts from Earth.”
“Um,” says Murphy.
“After your father was killed, your mother spent some of her saved ration credits on strawberries for you. But that was the last time she did anything like that.”
He remembers the crunch of them over his tongue; the way his saliva coaxed out the sweetness.
His guard holds out a clear hexagon to him. “You can see her again in the City of Light,” he says.
“You’re going to have to try way harder than that,” he says, and then he’s choking back laughter and then his breath, as he’s hit in the stomach, and yeah, he goes down pretty much instantly, onto his hands and knees, and he’s still kind of laughing in that weird mix of laughter/crying/breathing, and when he gets cuffed again and led back to his cold, bright cell, that’s fine.
—
The backpack is sitting on Raven’s desk in the main engineering room. It’s hooked up to her monitors, and she can see the whole of the City of Light through code; line after line after line of programming. She’s not great at scripting, but she remembers enough about the City to navigate her way around.
Unfortunately, that’s about all she can do. There isn’t really enough processing power in the monitors to allow her to edit the code. Ryfe sits down, watches her boot up the City and then mess around in it. Monty has followed them, and with him, Harper; eventually, the rest of their recon team filters in; Bellamy, Bryan, Miller, even Jasper. Raven doesn’t miss the way Bryan cuts a nod to Ryfe, the way she nods back, respect shared over a glance. Ryfe looks to the screens. “Mofi thinks that his job is done, so he’s left? But your City of Light is still here?”
“Yeah,” says Raven, unsure what she’s getting at.
“What was the last thing he said to you?”
“I’ll be good, I’ll be there soon, I’ll see you back at camp,” rumbles Bellamy.
Ryfe shakes her head. “You routinely receive food and supplies from Polis,” she says. “Where do you think that’s coming from?”
Monty shrugs. “It’s Clarke, right?”
She nods to Bellamy: “You know,” she says.
Bellamy blinks at her. “I don’t?”
Ryfe scowls. “Mofi is — employed — by Polis. One of his conditions of his continued employment was for this encampment to receive deliveries from Polis. Further, if he does not complete his mission within the required amount of time, you or I will be asked to kill him.”
“What?” says Raven. She can feel the hairs stand up all along her arms. Ryfe starts repeating herself. “No, I just —“ I just. Didn’t realize. I didn’t know.
Ryfe is looking past her now, to the screens. “Is something happening?” she asks.
Raven looks back to them. Static, all across her vision. She blinks. It retreats to the edges, just in her peripheral line of sight. The City of Light is on the move. “They’re coming here,” she says. “They’re — A.L.I.E is coming here.”
Ryfe stands up. “You should talk to Lincoln kom Trikru,” she says. “You’re gonna need some fucking sanctuary.”
—
Later, Dr. Griffin comes to visit him. He sits up when she comes in, looks her over. He doesn’t trust her, but he also knows that like, she’s okay.
“You’d never take the key,” he says. “How did you get here?”
Her eyes are bright. She looks more like Clarke does, if Clarke looked younger. “Thelonius showed me the way,” she says.
“Jesus Christ,” he says.
Her mouth pulls down. “I’m sorry for the way you’ve been treated,” she says. “We are just very excited for you to come to the City; the knowledge you could share with us, and your potential.”
Wow, gross. He turns his head to the side, refuses to talk to her.
She leaves a package of dehydrated strawberries in the corner of his cell when she leaves, and he gets it, okay, he understands that he is cuffed to a wall and he hasn’t eaten and when he was like eight, strawberries were his Thing, so whatever, he could take the key and be a weird emotionless soldier and also not remember anything that ever happened to him, and it’s almost, almost tempting but also. Also. There is a corporate logo stitched into the skin above his ribcage, coupled with the Commander and Raven’s trust in him. There is what the City of Light will take away: his pain and his penance and his birthright; his self-hatred and his redemption.
It’s tempting. He is weak. But he won’t.
Or so he keeps telling himself.
—
Lincoln directs most of the camp to a peninsula near the sea. He’s got this wistful little smile and he says, “It will be good for you to visit the ocean,” and then, “Floukru will take care of you.” He looks over Raven and her carrying a bundle of cords, and he has a quick conversation with Octavia in Trigedasleng.
Octavia looks to Raven, and Raven feels her cheeks warm. “You need to go underground,” she says, and then there’s a flurry of activity: their recon team loads into the back of Rover One, and Raven packs a host of electronics into Rover Two. Prosper, Moss, Ryfe, Lincoln and Octavia join her; there’s a pause, and then Indra climbs into the driver’s seat.
Raven plugs a hard drive into the AUX jack, and everyone startles except Octavia, who nods back at her.
And she doesn’t think of Murphy again until they arrive.
—
They take him out of his cell one last time. He is led to a different blank room somewhere in the Ark.
There are a lot of A.L.I.E’s people here. Eight, maybe. Dr. Griffin is here.
They back him into the wall, and Dr. Griffin says, “Careful now, John,” and like, Jaha couldn’t even bother to show up, and he clenches his jaw shut. Someone pinches his nose, and there’s another hand at his throat — He pulls back his lips in some parody of a smile, breathes through his teeth.
Raven is working on it. Raven is working on destroying the whole City of Light, right now. Maybe it’s already dead, and it just hasn’t caught up to him yet.
You exist as the stars exist, participating in their stillness, their immensity, and there’s fingers at the hinge of his jaw, pressing — The pain is enough to get him to open his mouth.
The pill is on his tongue, and then his jaw is forced closed, another wide hand over his mouth. Christ —
His head is tipped back. A strip of tape is applied to his lips - can’t move - his nose pinched shut again.
“You need to swallow, John,” says Dr. Griffin, which, really sound medical advice there! It’s fine!
They won’t let him breathe until he swallows, and he can’t fake it, because they’ll know when he enters the City. He thrashes, and they don’t let up and maybe it would be better to be dead!
He closes his eyes. He swallows.
He takes a deep breath, and he smells rain and gasoline.
He opens his eyes to grey and skyscrapers.
He’s going to fucking kill A.L.I.E.