Her eyes widened. “Your sister?” Unlike the blond girl, she made the word sound like something rare and precious. Okay, she was definitely new; everyone at the care center knew about him and Octavia. With the strict population laws, there hadn’t been siblings on the ship in at least a generation.

“Well, technically she’s my half sister—but we’re the only family each other’s got. Her name’s Octavia.” He smiled, just like he did whenever he said her name. “So did you just get here?”

She nodded. “I’m Lilly,” she said.

“That’s a pretty name.” The words slipped out before he realized how stupid they’d sound. “I’m Bellamy.” He tried to think of something else, to prove that he wasn’t a complete doofus, but the door slid open and the director trudged in.

“Not you again,” she said, shooting Bellamy a look of disapproval before turning her attention to Lilly. “Lilly Marsh?” she asked, in a voice Bellamy had never heard directed at him. “It’s very nice to meet you. Let’s go into my office and I’ll tell you a little more about how things work here.” As Lilly rose slowly to her feet, the director turned back to Bellamy. “One month of probation, and if you so much as step a toe out of line, you’re out of here. For good.”

Relief and confusion washed over Bellamy, but he wasn’t going to stick around long enough for the director to change her mind. He jumped from the chair and hurried toward the door. As he waited for it to open, he glanced over his shoulder to look back at Lilly.

To his surprise, she was smiling at him.

CHAPTER 6

Clarke

Whatever you do, don’t go inside the lab.

The anguished cries reached out to her, until Clarke couldn’t tell what was coming from the other side of the wall, and what was echoing in the shadowy depths of her own brain.

The experiments use dangerous levels of radiation. We don’t want you to get hurt.

The lab was nothing like she’d imagined. It was full of hospital beds instead of workstations. And in each bed was a child.

It’s our job to determine when Earth will be able to support human life again. Everyone is counting on us.

Clarke glanced around the room, looking for her friend Lilly. She was lonely. And scared. Everyone around her was dying. Their small bodies withered away until they were hardly more than wisps of skin and bone.

We never wanted you to find out this way.

But where was Lilly? Clarke came to visit her often, whenever her parents weren’t in the lab. She brought her friend presents, books she took from the library and candy she stole from the pantry at school. On Lilly’s good days, their laughter drowned out the sounds of the heart-rate monitors.

It wasn’t our idea. The Vice Chancellor forced us to experiment on those children. They would’ve killed us if we’d refused.

Clarke moved from bed to bed, each of them containing a sick child. But none of them were her best friend.

And then, suddenly, she remembered. Lilly was dead. Because Clarke had killed her.

They would’ve killed you too.

Lilly had begged her to make the pain go away. Clarke hadn’t wanted to, but she knew that Lilly had no chance of getting better. So eventually she’d agreed, and gave her friend the fatal drugs that ended her suffering.

I’m sorry, Clarke tried to tell her friend. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

“It’s okay, Clarke. Shhh, it’s okay. I’m right here.”

Clarke’s eyes snapped open. She was lying on a cot, her arm wrapped in bandages… why? What had happened?

Bellamy was sitting next to her, his face dirty and haggard. But he was smiling in a way Clarke hadn’t seen before, a wide, beaming grin without any hint of amusement or mockery. There was something startlingly intimate about it, as if this smile exposed more of Bellamy than she’d seen when they went swimming in their underwear.

“Thank god you’re okay. Do you remember getting bitten by the snake?” he asked. Clarke closed her eyes as fragments of memory shot through her mind. The slithering movement on the ground. The blinding pain. Yet at the moment, the only sensation she was aware of was the warmth of Bellamy’s hand on hers. “We gave you the universal antidote thing, but I wasn’t sure you got it in time.”

Clarke sat up, suddenly alert. “You carried me all the way back to camp?” Her cheeks flushed at the thought of being unconscious for that long in Bellamy’s arms. “And you figured out about the medicine?”

Bellamy shot a quick glance at the door. “That part was all Wells.”

The name landed with a thud in Clarke’s chest. After Wells stopped her from rushing into a burning tent to save her friend Thalia, she’d fled the camp in a haze of grief and rage. But as she looked around this new infirmary cabin, all she felt was sadness. Thalia was gone, but she couldn’t really blame Wells for what he’d done. He’d saved her life—twice now.

On the other side of the small cabin, a girl was curled up on a cot. Clarke pushed herself onto her elbows for a better look, but when Bellamy noticed the direction of her gaze, he sat down on the edge of Clarke’s cot, as if shielding her. “So,” he said, shooting a glance over his shoulder. “About that.”

In a strangely detached voice, he told Clarke about the attack that had killed Asher, and the girl Wells had taken prisoner.

“What?” Clarke sat bolt upright. “You’re telling me that girl over there was born on Earth?” Some small part of her had expected this since the orchard, but waking up to find an Earthborn meters away was almost too much to process. Thousands of questions exploded in every sector of her brain. How had they survived the Cataclysm? How many of them were there? Were there pockets of people all over the planet, or just in this area?

“Keep your voice down,” Bellamy whispered, placing a hand on Clarke’s shoulder and gently guiding her back down on the cot. “I think she’s asleep, and I want her to stay that way as long as possible. It’s creepy as all hell having her in here.”

Clarke shook off his hand and rose to her feet. The excitement and shock pulsing through her veins left her whole body trembling. “This is unbelievable. I have to talk to her!”

Before she could take another step, Bellamy grabbed her wrist. “That’s not a good idea. Her people took Octavia and killed Asher. We caught her spying on us.” His mouth twisted into a sneer. “She was probably trying to decide who to take next.”

Clarke stared at him in confusion. Why would they speculate about the girl’s motives instead of asking her? “Has anyone tried talking to her?” There was no danger in trying, especially since her hands and ankles were bound. Clarke rose onto the balls of her feet for a better look. The girl was curled up on her side, with her back to Bellamy and Clarke. It didn’t look like she’d moved at all.

Bellamy pulled Clarke back onto the cot with a tug. “I think the girl speaks English. She hasn’t said anything, but it seems like she understands what we’re saying. As soon as we get some useful information from her, I’ll head out to find Octavia.”

His voice was calm, but he couldn’t hide the note of anxiety when he said his sister’s name. For a moment, Clarke’s thoughts left the girl on the cot and returned to the woods where she and Bellamy had been following Octavia’s footprints. She felt a stab of guilt that he had abandoned Octavia’s trail in order to carry her all the way back here.

“Bellamy,” she said slowly as another thought took shape. “That wreckage we found. Did you see the logo on it? It said TG.” Every child on the Colony knew that TG, Trillion Galactic, was the company that had originally built their ship.

“I know,” he said. “But that could mean anything.”

“It’s not from our dropship,” she said quickly, her voice rising in excitement. “Which means it has to be from something else the Colony sent down. Maybe some kind of drone? Or what if…” She trailed off, suddenly hesitant to share the spark of an idea forming in the back of her mind. “I think it’s important that we figure out what it is,” she finished vaguely.