Sasha gave him a long, searching look before raising her bound hands from her lap. “Okay. But no more handcuffs. You know I’m not going anywhere.”
Wells untied her and then, while Sasha rearranged her fur wrap, went over to check on Molly. “Hey,” he whispered, crouching next to her cot. “How are you feeling?” She murmured something but didn’t open her eyes. “Molly?” With a sigh, Wells pulled her blanket up over her thin shoulders, then tucked a strand of sweat-dampened hair behind her ear. “I’ll be back soon,” he said quietly.
Wells peeked into the clearing. Most of the camp was still gathered around the fire, or putting the finishing touches on the new roof. If they hurried, they’d be able to leave unseen. Wells chose not to dwell on the fact that, for the second time that day, he was doing something secret, hiding his actions from the rest of the group. He turned around to gesture to Sasha, and then they quickly darted outside and across the tree line.
Sasha led Wells in a different direction this time, one he hadn’t taken before. Unlike Bellamy, he hadn’t spent a great deal of time in the woods, and was only familiar with the path they usually took to fetch water from the stream. “Watch out,” Sasha called over her shoulder. “It gets pretty steep here.”
Steep was a bit of an understatement. The ground suddenly fell away, and Wells was forced to creep down sideways, grabbing on to the thin, flexible trees that grew out of the hillside to keep himself from tumbling down. The incline was so sharp that some of their roots grew out into the air instead of down into the ground.
Sasha didn’t seem bothered by the grade. She’d barely slowed down and was now several meters ahead of Wells. She’d extended her arms to the side, using her outstretched fingers for balance, looking like the birds he’d seen swooping above the clearing.
A loud crack sounded from behind. Startled, Wells whipped his head around. The movement was enough to send his feet flying out from under him, and he fell, sliding down the slick grass. He tried to dig his fingers into the ground to slow himself down, but he kept gaining speed until something jerked him to a stop. Breathless, he looked up to see Sasha grinning at him as she held the collar of his jacket. “You’re going to have to wait a few months for sledding,” she said as she helped pull him to his feet.
“Sledding?” Wells repeated as he brushed off the back of his pants and tried not to think about how much of an idiot he must’ve looked. “You mean there’s going to be snow?”
“If you’re still alive that long,” Sasha said, grabbing Wells’s elbow as he slipped again.
“If I die before seeing snow, it’ll be because I have one of your friends’ arrows in my back. Not because I keep falling on my ass.”
“How many times do I have to explain this? Those people are most definitely not my friends.”
“Yeah, but don’t you know them well enough to ask them to stop trying to kill us?” he replied, searching her face for a hint of whatever she was hiding from him.
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” she said, pulling him along the slope.
Wells gestured downward. “You seem to like complicated.”
She rolled her eyes. “Trust me, space boy. This will be worth it.”
When they were almost at the bottom, Wells pushed off the hill to jump down the last few meters. But instead of landing on grass, his feet struck something hard. The impact was enough to send a jolt of pain shooting up his legs, though fortunately, he managed to stay upright this time. He winced, but when he glanced down, surprise chased away all thoughts of discomfort.
The ground wasn’t grass or dirt. It was rock. He bent down and brushed his fingers along the rough gray surface. No, not rock—this was a road. Wells jumped back and looked from side to side, half expecting to hear the rumble of an engine.
“Are you okay?” Sasha asked, coming to stand next to him. Wells nodded, unsure how to explain. When he’d found Clarke stranded in the ruins of the church, he’d been too terrified to focus on anything besides getting her out. Now he leaned over to study the cement, the way its fissures cracked and grew, small plants growing in the gaps.
On the Colony, it had been easy to think about the Cataclysm in the abstract sense. He knew how many people had died when it’d happened, how many metric tons of toxins had been released into the air and so on. But now, he thought about the people who’d driven, ran, or maybe even crawled down this road in a desperate attempt to escape the bombs. How many people had died in this very spot as the earth shook and the sky filled with smoke?
“It’s just over here,” Sasha said, placing her hand on his shoulder. “Follow me.”
“What’s just over there?” he asked, turning his head from side to side. The air felt different here than it did in the clearing, heavy with memories that made Wells shiver.
“You’ll see.”
They walked in silence for a few minutes. With each step, Wells’s heart began to beat a little faster. “You have to promise me you won’t tell anyone about this,” Sasha said. Her voice grew quiet, and she glanced nervously over her shoulder.
Wells hesitated. He’d learned the hard way what happened when you made promises you couldn’t keep. “You can trust me,” he said finally.
Sasha stared at him for a moment, then nodded. As they turned around a bend in the road, Wells’s skin began to tingle, his nerves buzzing with energy as his body braced for whatever awaited them.
But when the road straightened out again, there was nothing. Only more cracked pavement veined with plants.
“There,” Sasha said, pointing toward the trees that bordered the side of the road. “Do you see it?”
Wells started to shake his head, then froze as a geometric outline took shape among the tangle of branches.
It was a house.
“Oh my god,” Wells whispered as he took a few steps forward. “This is impossible. I thought there was nothing left!”
“There’s not much. But these mountains protected a few structures from the blasts. Most of the people around here survived the bombs, but died later from starvation or radiation poisoning.”
As they got closer, Wells saw that the house was made of stone, which he supposed had a better chance of weathering the destruction, although much of the right side had collapsed.