let me see your scars
Jasper bursts through the door. “Are you going to torture him?” he says, voice out-of-breath and shaky. “Don’t —“
“Oh my God,” says Bellamy, already having decided on a course of action, already having followed it through to its natural conclusion in his head. Something had to be done, and so he is doing it now, himself, because nobody else will be willing to.
Jasper is aware of himself in full; how useless he is, how useless he has always been, skinny and weak and underfed; ineffective without a gun. He steps between them. “You’ll have to get through me first,” he says, and he has no allegiance to Murphy, but he remembers being afraid and helpless, remembers Harper, Fox, Monty — he remembers being under someone’s thumb, with no recourse besides his own self.
And — Maya.
He thinks about Maya, and that pain is all-encompassing but so familiar, and he hauls back and punches Bellamy in the face.
—
Raven takes off her headphones, saves, stands up, stretches. There’s something going on in the adjacent room. She closes out of her program and leans hard on the table. Her good leg is asleep. Her bad leg is mostly pain.
There’s yelling. She stumbles as best she can to lean over the half-door. Miller has a shocklash. Bellamy is bleeding. Jasper is also bleeding. Murphy is backed up against the wall, watching them without fear. “What are you doing,” she asks, but flattens it at the end, already knowing.
Miller turns, flips the shocklash over in his hands. “What does it look like?” he asks, matching her tone.
“Lemme see that,” she says, and Miller crosses to hand it to her. She examines it. “He doesn’t have pain receptors,” she says. “I wouldn’t even bother.”
“Worked on you,” Miller points out.
She sighs. She doesn’t really want to explain this basic concept over and over again. “It’s different,” she says. “A.L.I.E’s learned. So don’t.” She’s still holding onto it, and she tosses it gently onto her desk chair. She is going to shut the door, but someone is saying her name.
Someone is saying her name.
“01010010 01100001 01110110 01100101 01101110.” She recognizes it immediately. She always does.
But Murphy doesn’t know binary code. Murphy hands her chewed up electronics with the wires sawed off and asks if she can fix them. Murphy is more likely to smash technology than be able to repair it. It’s. It’s not really Murphy.
“Fuck off,” she mutters, hardly audible.
“01110000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110011 01100101,” he says, a touch of desperation.
“You shot Harper,” she says, an accusation. Static, all across her vision. Is she talking to A.L.I.E, or is she talking to Murphy? Is there really, at this point, any sort of distinction between them? “If you want me to give you anything, you have to give me something first.”
Murphy has come around Bellamy now, is shoving Miller aside. Miller lets him.
His wrist is broken. He doesn’t seem to care. “What do you want,” he asks, and there’s blood dripping out of his nose.
Static. She wants to walk down the streets of the City of Light, feel the rain on her skin, wants to see the streetlamps and the cars and the reminder of a city built over two hundred years ago —
“17VoZSFit~6_oHj{KYJ6YRihuSEk58,” says Murphy. “7msDjpDC8QJ?Y-9aJ6z3V:)]ik0Z^KpN<a.H3r9skvN&%9@Tm>BaG9x4Srz?q?2.”
Those aren’t words — that’s part of an encryption key. She pulls back out of the half-door, comes around to her desk, and pulls up the code again. Starts typing.
Everything is opening up; the city’s secrets are becoming clear to her.
She hardly notices the dull sound of Murphy collapsing on the other side of the door. Someone else can take care of him.
She’s getting closer.
—
This morning, Moss had grasped her shoulder and said: “Aperis tu manum tuam ad te prius.” To hold, you must first open your hand. Then he had given her a smile and gone off into the woods. There was talk of finding an electromagnetic pulse and getting a battery, to pull Mofi out of the City of Light, but she doesn’t know the details and doesn’t care to. She did not make herself for this. She learned how to operate a gun, a Skaikru weapon, to teach Mofi, but she is an old dog. There are too many new tricks.
She is sitting on the bed in the room Luna has assigned to her, almost dozing but not quite, when Bellamy comes to lean in the doorway. He is made of half-promises and cracking glass. “Hey,” he says.
She doesn’t respond.
He keeps leaning in the doorway. He asks: “How many people have you killed?”
“Fifty-one,” she says. She could recite this answer with her eyes closed, in the dark; it is always close to her. It lives on her skin.
“You keep count,” he says, not a question.
She opens her eyes, takes in the full measure of him. “How can you not?” she asks. It is not a matter of honor, it is not a matter of pride, it is — “I am not so callous or so careless as to have yet lost track.”
He swallows. “Would you tell me?”
“How many people have you killed?” She asks in turn.
Darts his eyes away from her face, tells the wall behind her: “Six hundred and seventy-seven.”
Ryfe hears herself make a noise, an aborted laugh, maybe. “And they call Clarke wanheda.”
Bellamy kind of shrugs, and she — Well. She has done this before.
“Blood must have blood,” she tells him. “Come here. Let me see your scars.”
She was not in Polis that day, but Mofi has recounted it to her: You can lash him thirty times. And then send him to Oshokru: he can learn that Grounders are people. His debt is paid. She doesn’t have to agree with it.
He goes to her, a tentative trust sparking. She makes room for him on the bed. He sits on the edge, and after a beat, takes off his shirt.
His scars have healed nicely: all that remains of the evidence are thin, pale lines of damaged tissue, skin that won’t darken underneath the sun.
Ryfe takes a deep breath. “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction,” she tells him. “Do you regret what you did?”
“Yes,” he says, instantly.
She sighs and reframes her question: “Do you regret what you had to do?”
There’s no answer to that one. She continues.
“I was fourteen winters old when I took my first debt. It was the warmest summer I had ever had: I was always running around barefoot with the Nightbloods. It’s this one, look: my sun tattoo.” On her ankle: ochre against skin. Bellamy stares: he’s surely seen the same thing on Mofi hundreds of times. “I had one month,” she says. “I completed it within a week.” They were an easy target. She had completed it with no more than her slingshot and then, just the first four fingers of her left hand.
“Someone offered me a gun and passage to the ground if I shot the Chancellor,” says Bellamy, unprompted. “I had to protect my sister. My responsibility.” Like he’s still trying to convince himself of it.
“May I touch you?” she asks, and he nods his consent, and still flinches away from her hand on his shoulder. “Listen,” she says. “Listen. You are not blameless, but you carry too much blame. You were not built to carry this kind of pain. Octavia can take care of herself. Clarke can take care of herself. You need to learn to do the same. You have to learn to live with what you’ve done.”
“Okay,” says Bellamy.
She drops her hand. “If you hurt Mofi, I will slit your throat.”
Bellamy laughs quietly, like he doesn’t think she’s serious, or has accepted this reality already and finds it funny. “Okay.”
She lets it go. She lets Bellamy sit there for too long, shirtless, head bowed, until she touches his shoulder again and says: “To hold, you must first open your hand.” He opens both of his hands, palm-up, and she grasps him by the wrists and pulls him to his feet.